The US subprime crisis, and the wave of foreclosures and evictions which ensued, left a ticking timebomb: countless thousands of abandoned swimming pools; ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes. But not to worry: help is at hand, in the form of
armies of underground skateboarders who find abandoned pools, drain them and skate in them:
Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.”
Mr. Peacock travels around town in his pickup searching for the addresses of homes he has learned have been foreclosed on, either via the Internet or from a friend who works in real estate. He has also learned to spot a foreclosed house, he said, by looking for “dead grass on the lawn and lockboxes on the front door.”