For the past few weeks it seems we have been plagued with ghosts, remnants of the past that reappear in the form of toxic waste or a building suddenly in danger of collapse. Centuries of human industriousness have left their mark on our region, sometimes hidden, like the poisons in the soil on Cape Road in Ellenville, sometimes painfully apparent, like the shuttered Nevele and Williams Lake resorts. What are we supposed to do, today, with the remnants of the good, and not so good, ideas of the past? What do we do with old factories, old hotels, old malls, old airports, old railroad bridges?

Left as they are, to rot and fall apart, they're a problem, an economic and social burden to our region. They also provide a visual blight that can discourage people from moving here, or businesses from opening here. If they can't be repurposed, then they need to be removed.

But deconstructing large buildings and tearing up acres of concrete is not a viable option for a landowner saddled with an obsolete commercial property. Somehow, they need to make a return on their investment. Such a "reverse development" has no known profit model, as far as we can tell. Something else has to be done.

Whatever that something is, we know one thing about it, it's going to be expensive, it's going to cost someone a lot of money, and it won't be paid by the person, or business that created the structure, and therefore the problem, in the first place.

It's a heretical thought, but it needs to be articulated. Does anyone, or any business, have the right to build something, then go bust and leave the ruins and the mess to everyone else?

Now, we do have the Superfund Law, which hunts down polluters from long ago and tries to make them clean up the mess, or at least pay for someone else to do so. That's because the link between toxic pollution and the harm it does to people has become too obvious to ignore. The legacy of chemical plumes moving through the ground contaminating the water we drink and the air we breathe is way beyond business as usual. It's a violation of the law, and is treated as such.

But in their way, dead malls, abandoned resorts, and rotting factories, are toxins of another kind, imposing the costs of cleanup on either the community that inherits them, or any business that seeks to reuse their sites.

So, it seems a fair question to ask. Should there be some societal mechanism that would deal with these problems, and their cost, in a similar way to how we've chosen to deal with toxic waste? Why must a community be plagued with abandoned malls and factories, while the businesses that profited from them are allowed to go on their merry way? Shouldn't they be responsible, in some way, for a more graceful exit?