You are the reason for the empty spaces

What kind of eerie spaces are emerging from the Great Recession?  One example from the midwest:

The logo reads: "You are the reason we are here!"

Planet Money adds: "And the reason we're gone."

Comments

[BlogDog]

I especially like the mall map they have with a red dot and the caption "You are not here."

[HP]

I noticed about a year ago that "run down strip mall" has become the default setting for all my nightmares.

In my dreams, more often than not, I drive into a parking lot and enter a small store where I try to purchase some tschochke. The clerk asks me to wait. While waiting I notice a small door that leads to some scene of 19th c. industrial decay. After traveling for a while through brick and iron ruins, I reemerge in the 1980s era mall, leave, and run to my car. Attempting to leave the strip mall, I run into a maze of one-way streets that grow progressively narrower until I find my car wedged between concrete abutments somewhere on the borderland between city and town.

Thanks so much for rendering my nightmares in photographs.