Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Times Square Bomber Gets a Crumbling Surbuban Facade


As they grope to make sense of Faisal Shahzad, the alleged failed Times Square car bomber, the newspapers are going with the "suburban time bomb" angle, playing on the fact that Shahzad owned--and left to foreclosure--a house in Shelton, Connnecticut, a former factory town on the Housatonic River north of Bridgeport. (photo by Professor Bop) This narrative line nicely ties together paranoia about the placidity of the suburbs--"it's quiet out here, a little too quiet--with the ravages of the real-estate boom.

The New York Times' front page sets the tone with the headline, "A Suburban Father Who Gave No Warning Sign," though there's little in the way of suburban angst in the story that follows. Instead, realty-obsessed New Yorkers get a rundown on the property's descending fortunes. Shahzad bought his new-construction, single family home in 2004 for $273,000 with a $218,000 mortgage, the Times reports, before kicking at the alleged mass-murderer for trying "to cash in on the real estate boom." Listed for $329,000 in 2006, the house finally sold within the past year for $284,500.

By that time, Shahzad had long since abandoned suburban life. In June of 2009, he stopped paying his mortgage and moved his family to Pakistan, where he may have gotten some terrorist training, according to reports.

This isn't the usual route to the heartbreak of foreclosure, but that doesn't keep The Danbury News Times, presumably with better local sources, from spinning a deeper tale of suburban desuetude: "American Dream faded quickly for accused terrorist" reads the paper's headline.

The NT's contribution to the real-estate story is that Shahzad bought the home four years before he married--just one of the 52 percent of singletons choosing the burbs over city life that Coldwell-Banker has been touting in recent weeks. The local paper also turns up a $65,000 home equity loan taken on the property in February 2009, leading a University of New Haven professor to speculate that Shahzad was struggling to keep up with the Joneses. "Maybe he was starting to see the hopes of living the good life in America die and he began feeling like a failure," says clinical psychologist and criminal-law prof James Monahan.

Maybe. Or perhaps the frame of suburban economic and spiritual shipwreck doesn't fit the picture. Maybe three months before he left for Pakistan, Shahzad was already turning toward terrorist activity and was looking to suck funds out of a property he was intending to walk away from. We'll never know--that's the way it is with these mild-mannered suburban madmen.

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