The visible damage arrived last.
Field Notes
Blight is often described as though it appears suddenly.
A boarded window.
An abandoned lot.
A burned house.
But most blight is not an event.
It is a process.
Long before a building falls apart, something else begins to disappear.
Investment leaves.
Opportunity leaves.
Services leave.
Attention leaves.
The physical damage is often the final chapter in a much longer story.
The burned house becomes the thing we notice.
The conditions that made it vulnerable are easier to overlook.
By the time blight becomes visible, it has usually been growing for years. Sometimes decades.
The fire is the photograph.
The story started much earlier.