Lower Home Sales, Higher Suburbs

Your home-energy bills might seem like a crime to you, but that's not why police departments from Florida to Washington state and up into Canada are examining suburban utility bills. The cops are looking for a tip-off that a home is being used as an indoor pot farm.

Raids of two houses near Miami late last month turned up marijuana operations worth nearly a million dollars a year in annual sales, according to the Associated Press. A coordinated effort by federal and local agents aimed at stamping out house farms is making hay in some top locales. "You can go into any neighborhood, the nicest neighborhood you want, and the person next door could be a marijuana grower," a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the AP.

Detecting a pot farm isn't easy. Cops often rely on neighbors to notice when an empty house on the block starts to get regular visits from strangers. They also look for telltales like a spike in water or electricity use as pot growers provide their plants with rain-forest levels of moisture and artificial sunlight. In response, farmers tap illegally into electric lines or water mains to evade the meter. Besides running up energy costs for everyone else, these jury-rigged conduits sometimes electrify the ground outside the home.

So far, law-enforcement agencies are concentrating on drug syndicates, like the Cuban gangs behind many farms in the Miami area. But as the subprime crisis empties out houses across the United States and homeowners look for ways to make their mortgage payments, look for amateurs to get into the racket: One suspected grower arrested in Miami is an older woman known in her neighborhood as the lady who drives the ice-cream truck.