The Economics of Erasure

Declared worthless. Made profitable. Hidden in plain sight.

Let’s talk about value today.

Not the kind on price tags or Zillow listings or in the corner of your bank app. I mean real value—the kind that moves, flows, animates, circulates.

Because if you want to understand why the world looks the way it does—why neighborhoods rot while luxury condos sit empty, why homelessness exists in a nation full of homes, why cities can afford new stadiums but not running water—you have to start with how value is created, and more importantly, how it’s controlled.

Let’s start small. Take coins.

When a country demonetizes a coin, it declares it worthless. It removes it from the economy, takes it out of circulation. Yet, something interesting happens…

That same coin, now useless for buying bread or gas or anything at all, starts to rise in another market. It becomes collectible. It gains symbolic weight. It gathers new value—not because of what it does, but because of what it means.

The paradox is simple: remove an object’s function, and you may just increase its significance.

Money becomes memory. Currency becomes artifact. Function becomes mythology.

And the same thing happens with land.

Governments and markets use narrative the way magicians use sleight of hand.

A neighborhood isn’t ever inherently good or bad—it’s just made to seem that way through policy, media, zoning, and a thousand silent signals.

Whole blocks or communities can be declared worthless without a single building falling down.

Once the designation is in place—“blighted,” “high-crime,” “undesirable”—the market withdraws.

Services vanish. Schools decay. Loans disappear. And the people left behind are expected to self-destruct on cue.

It’s not a failure of governance. It’s the design.

Once value has been stripped away, someones are standing on the sidelines waiting to bring it back.

Someone with vision. Someone with capital. Someone with friends on the planning board.

Someones who know that beneath the decay, the land itself never stopped being valuable.

You see, devaluation isn’t an ending. It’s a setup.

Just like a demonetized coin, a demonized neighborhood can be reborn as a collector’s item—as long as the right people show up to “redeem” it.

The artist class. The gentrifiers. The nonprofits with glossy reports and capital campaigns.

Then suddenly, the exact same block that used to be called dangerous becomes “up-and-coming.”

The same buildings, now painted, are luxury lofts and galleries. The same land, now rezoned, is the future.

It’s not rebirth. It’s repackaging.

But here’s where it gets darker.

The analogy doesn’t end with currency and real estate. It goes even deeper. Because the same thing happens with people.

What you’ve watched on the screens, we’ve witnessed through the windows of our cars and living rooms.

The offensive dialogue you quote because you think it’s funny is real talk on the streets. Nobody’s giggling here.

When humans are no longer seen as productive—when they are poor, disabled, undocumented, traumatized, noncompliant—they are removed from circulation.

No longer part of the economic flow. No longer “valuable.”

So what happens to them?

They’re warehoused. Caged. Trafficked. Or made to perform in bunk rooms stacked three high.

They’re shifted from shelter to shelter, policy to policy, caseworker to caseworker—if those even exist—institution to institution, until they disappear.

But here’s the trick: we are still valuable—just not in ways the public sees.

Because for every person cast out of the visible economy, a shadow economy waits to absorb them.

There are contracts for bodies.

State budgets that depend on filled beds.

Cities that receive funding based on how many “special populations” they house.

And enough sinners in the world to satisfy them all.

Developers who get tax credits for pretending to serve the poor while building units no one can afford.

Nursing, group, and care homes that provide anything but.

And the American public—ever distracted, ever polarized—debate whether the problem is too much government or not enough.

Whether “we” need more police or more programs.

Whether capitalism is broken or socialism is to blame.

But all of that is noise. The truth is much simpler.

You are being ruled by people who know exactly how the system works, because they built it to function like this.

They made housing a commodity.

They made care conditional.

They made suffering profitable.

And then they wrapped it in red, white, and blue, gave it a slogan, and sold it back to you as democracy.

They’ll even supply you with candy and popcorn to enjoy the show—mainstream America’s drugs of choice.

Let’s take Niagara Falls, NY for example—just one face of the machine.

Once known as the honeymoon capital of the world and revered for its beauty and power, it’s become and remains a dangerous slum for many decades.

I lived there. I invested there. I poured everything I had into building something sacred, in a place that’s been kept deliberately broken. Of course, I didn’t know how it all worked back then.

I’ve seen it firsthand: the city does not want restoration. It wants containment, extortion, and annihilation. I believed their slogans and liberal rhetoric for a while. Then I experienced the truth.

You think crime is out of control? Crime is organized.

You think the problem is poverty? Poverty is engineered.

You think no one’s fixing it because they’re incompetent? No. They’re getting paid to keep it broken.

The state sends money. Developers buy and sit on property. Contracts exchange hands.

Trafficking continues under institutional silence.

And if you try to build something clean, human, and alive—they bury you in paperwork, delay, and obstruction.

They dump garbage on your land, sending code enforcement to make you pay fines.

They’ll shoot up your house from across the alley for practice.

After all, you must have money if you’re there by choice. Right?

Why? Because the greedy don’t know how to build with the needy, and the needy believe that everyone’s greedy.

Everyone’s constantly trying to extract from us.

But here’s the thing they didn’t account for: some of us came here to flip the system, not the property.

Some of us hold blueprints that don’t need state approval or venture capital or nonprofit acceptance.

Some of us are building futures that cannot be co-opted.

There is a plan. But it is not in their hands.

It is not performative.

It is not symbolic.

It is not for sale.

It is rooted in land. In people. In memory. In love.

It is passed on through the energy of people, plants, and animals.

It is not about revitalization. It’s about reconsecration.

Because nothing’s ever just been about coins or neighborhoods or programs. This was always about value—who gets to define it, who gets to access it, who gets to hoard it, and who lives surrounded by it.

So when the system tells you something is worthless or worth a lot—look again.

That’s often where the sacred lives.