Good Lord!

I have seen the 25-year plan for Pacific. In 25 years there will be no Pacific; it will be at the bottom of a man-made recreational lake ringed with McMansions, and somebody will make big money. Historic flooding in 2015, then worse in 2017, twice drowned half the town's housing and businesses; in 2017, the water topped the railroad tracks for the first time. The town was now floodplain and there was no two ways about it. Some residents FEMA'd and some didn't. When we're weary some developer will propose a glamorous lake in place of the sleepy little town and grease some pockets and make it so. But my mind was elsewhere when today I saw the little white country church lifted on pallets way up in the air, and thought, "Good Lord!"

I know buildings get raised and moved, a task I can't even begin to comprehend, and here I could watch it happen by hopping out of my car and telling a worker how amazed I was, and could I take a photo.

"Is the church being raised because of the flooding?" I asked, above the roar of the Bobcat. (Here, "bobcat" is both noun and verb.)

"Just like we raised the other houses around here," he said, and for the first time I looked around and saw that more than half the houses on the street, formerly ground-level bungalows, were now poised on new, high, solid concrete foundations -- ten feet high? twelve feet? More? The doors in front and back were now accessed with handsome new wooden staircases that one could tie a rowboat to. Those folks were staying put, flood or no. And my heart was glad.

Toothpicks and Tarpaper

Not far from here some farmer sold an acre along the highway to a real-estate developer. The developer shaved all the trees off, and in record time, using toothpicks and tarpaper, erected another of those "dream houses," aka "McMansions." It has columns out front and a little treeless yard. It has never had an occupant, not in four years.

Nearby, within sight, are three acres of pasture in -- get this -- a floodplain. There a developer built yet another dream house, dressing it up with curtains and porch lights. Every summer for four years now, the hopeful real-estate agent opens up one door of the three-car garage and parks a car in it, and puts a kids' trampoline in the back yard. But you never see any kids, because there aren't any parents dumb enough to buy a dream-house in a floodplain.

On a ridge just above it, visible only in winter when the trees are transparent, is a huge rustic barnlike "dream house" with a wraparound porch and dramatic rows of Anderson windows. The buyers wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast in the nice oak-and-hickory Missouri woods. Anyone could have told them that city folk on weekends don't want to bed-and-breakfast in the woods. They want to be able to walk up the street to have a latte and buy antiques. This dream-house was advertised for sale in the paper, for $550,000. It's still for sale, for $450,000.

Now, you and I know that most people can't pay $450,000 for a house, or even $300,000. Even $200,000 is a little steep for most families. And the economists are wondering how it happened that "the bottom fell out of the housing market."