Not Spring Yet

"I've been thinking about starting a category just for sunny news — because occasionally, there is some. Today, Simon Johnson of Baseline Scenario suggested the name 'Green Shoots'."
Laura Conaway, NPR's Planet Money Blog. 23 February, 2009

Back when then esteemed Ms. Conaway was actively managing the Planet Money Flickr page, and I (among other people) was contributing photographs, I started to long for some of Mr. Johnson's Green Shoots. While it was easy to find pictures of the economy to take, many of them were downright depressing - failing businesses, abandoned projects and empty shopping malls were easy subjects to find. Taking photographs that illustrated the post-crisis economy was enough to land one on medications.

So I was somewhat excited to find that a furniture store, and then a second, opened in Kirkland's Totem Lake Mall in the first half of 2010. If furniture stores were opening, perhaps people were feeling better about the housing market. And while I was leery about what struck me as myriad attempts to re-inflate the housing bubble, a little confidence was surely a welcome thing.

But it was not to last. The first of the stores was liquidating its inventory only a year after it opened, and the other is doing so now, having lasted about two years itself. Green shoots withering and dying in a harsh landscape.