I'm pretty much East Coast in terms of my frame of reference, though I have travelled and spent time in other areas such as the Pacific Northwest (San Fransisco northwards to Oregon and Seattle), Boulder City, Nevada, and Denver, Colorado.

But those pictures of development in the middle of dry scrubland/desert are unbelievable, as unbelievable as the homes I saw being built on the coast in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia - this had been prevented in the past, but the evidence of homes built less than 20 feet above high tide, with nothing stopping the waves but the gently sloping beach, itself moving sand, was stunning. But beaches are luxury, however defined, as was Marin County in the mid-80s- houses built on hillsides that wouldn't last a decade, much less the next truly heavy rain or an earthquake.

But this is thousands of people at a time, involving not so theoretical hundreds of millions of dollars for the housing alone, much less the possessions of the people moving in - bought on debt or not, they also represent a necessary component of the current economy by providing an ever larger amount of space to fill with consumer goods. Creating emptiness to fill seems an American specialty (I'm spending this week getting rid of stuff - The size of the housing is also incredible - somehow, it seems more stark out West.

Even in E.T., you can see how alien the suburb is in its surroundings (which tend to be Hollywood augmented in a number of ways), but this is something else - this is truly nowhere in a sense that had never occurred to me. My memories or riding a motorcycle out from Vegas involve stark landscapes with little built in the emptiness, especially the park, military, and reservation land.

But like the building on the beach, it seems as if building in the desert is no longer treated with even minimal restraint.