Pinned to my wall in front of my desk at home is a Polaroid photograph I took of Coney Island a couple of summers ago. I often stare at it when writer’s block begins to set in, jangling my nerves. The photograph is like a window that always looks out onto a lazy summer Sunday afternoon. It is a respite from the world of words and deadlines. It is a dose of unfettered peace.

Tranquility, of course, is not what we associate with Coney Island. Its charm is in the feeling of a celebration frozen in time: The carnies loudly hocking their games, the screams echoing from the rides, the disparate languages clashing and then blending into one mass sound, the smell of cheap beer and Nathan’s stuck forever in the thick air.

But the photograph on my wall is not the Coney Island of postcards and newspaper clippings. It is instead a simple shot of a beach, stripped of definition. It could be anywhere. The sand stretches out into the distant water. A slightly overcast sky hangs in the foreground and then seems to drop into the Atlantic Ocean miles away. Several tiny, nondescript bodies stand in repose. Perhaps it is not really a photograph of anywhere, but rather nowhere.

It is a snapshot of New York that is almost impossible to imagine: Tucked into the largest city in the country—a densely populated urban colossus—rests a nearly empty, quiet landscape. The Earth returned to water. Coney Island frozen in time.

The landscape, though, is out of context. Just beyond the reach of the photograph lies a city of endless closed-space growth. Every block is filled. All bodies are attached. Where there is no property, the property is being built. Where the property is not being built, it is being planned. We are almost to the point where we can no longer build out, but we can build up. We’ve taken all the land, now we can take the sky.

The average cost for an apartment in Manhattan is roughly $1.3 million.¹ This is a number that no longer carries meaning. It is simply our destiny. You cannot afford to live here, but you will come here. We will make space for you. We will build more for you. We spawn brash, massive towers and give them grand names like Empire and Chrysler and Freedom. We’ve taken the land, now give us the sky.

The rush to develop has always been simple. If they come, then you build it. Demand breeds property. This is especially true in New York, where the clamor for housing remains strong even as the real estate market has crashed across the country.²

But how long can this go on? The surge in development during the real estate boom was partly based on artificial demand: Easy credit and skyrocketing home values that dwarfed the interest on loans lured unqualified homeowners and money-hungry speculators into the market. These were conditions that could not last.

The disastrous housing crisis in this country has exposed, not just a deeply flawed mortgage industry and misguided securities market, but America’s destructive gluttony for property. It has exposed us as a nation that spends what we don’t have.

Consider the case of Miami. In 2004, at the height of that city’s unprecedented condominium boom, 50 massive condo projects had once been under construction within 50 city blocks in Miami or close to Biscayne Bay, according to a published report. (Florida Governor Charlie Crist, speaking at a homebuilder’s conference in Orlando, was quoted as saying, “Have you been to Miami lately? It’s like we have a new state bird: the building crane.”) Roughly 69,000 condo units were for sale, being built, or being considered for a permit citywide.³

It was further reported that even as the massive oversupply of condos dropped home prices down as much as 30% and dragged the economy to the edge of a recession this past summer, the development in Miami continued unabated. By July, 37 high-rise condos, with about 22,000 new units, were being built in downtown.⁴

In Arizona, which was considered by many to be utopia’s ground zero during the housing boom, roughly 46,000 homes went unsold in 2006.⁵ The news is no better for the other golden children of real estate’s recent explosion. Nevada led the country with nearly 17,000 foreclosures on about 13,000 properties in the third quarter, while California was second with more than 148,000 foreclosures on about 95,000 properties.⁶

Home ownership, we are told, is the holy grail of the American Dream. We are continually reminded of this in the countless articles that have been written about the housing bust. But America is now littered with abandoned property as demand failed to meet supply, or supply guessed wrong on demand while interest rates stayed dangerously low for too long. Or simply, we pretended to buy what we couldn’t afford and lost what we never really owned. We forfeited payments on the American Dream.

What gets overlooked in the weepy tales of lost homes is the increasingly lost belief in leaving land untouched. Our development continues its endless sprawl, and we hold up inarguable tenets of capitalism like personal property ownership as justification to build more. “Home ownership is the American Dream.” Never mind that we never owned it in the first place. Never mind that we now await the government to bail us out and help us keep our property.

What we are creating in America is a country where every space is a place. There is no “nowhere” in our cities to run to for escape from homes and shopping malls and state-of the-art sports stadiums. We are now bigger than the vast land we occupy and suffocating on ourselves.

When Neil Armstrong looked out from the moon’s surface, he said, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

Crowded as we have now become, it is still possible to take in the immensity of our home. While flying across the country I can look down and still see it: The swashes of blues and browns and greens, left alone to exist as space. Suspended in air, I can put up my thumb and shut one eye, and blot out the encroaching development of more places. I can feel small again up in the open range of nowhere.

And when I stare at the picture on my wall of an undefined beach on a meaningless Sunday afternoon, I realize that a Coney Island of the Mind is not always found in the jubilant celebration of people and places, but in the chance to still walk away from both, and toward the vast calm of an Earth reduced to its naked self.

From up there I look down on the overwhelming complexity of land and water and cityscapes and hope that we still fear an America that has been reduced to, as Ferlinghetti wrote, “freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.”

The great investment in real estate failed. We should invest in something else. A Coney Island frozen in time. The Earth returned to water. The land returned to us.