ANOTHER HILLSIDE
Click picture to enlarge.
The picture I take for the October coloring is on the northside of the valley; the above picture is the southside. It's Aurene, a housing project originally meant to house all the Phd's Corning Inc. was planning on bringing into the company. Its R&D facility, the vaunted Sullivan Park, where the Phd's would have worked is located beyond the left side of the picture. But then the telecom bubble burst around 2002 and everything crumbled.
Corning, Shattered: Wall Street treated Corning as a wild Internet play, bidding up its stock more than tenfold from a split-adjusted $10 to $113 by late 2000. Its market value rose to over $115 billion, making the Houghtons the 12th richest family in the U.S., worth $2.6 billion. But when the telecom bubble burst, the company was so caught off-guard that now its very future is in peril.
This is from a Forbes article dated 6/9/02:
In 1998, Corning sold Gerry A. Jackson, a Park City, Utah, real estate developer, 426 acres of land stretching up into the deer-infested hills behind its Sullivan Park research labs for $900,000. Jackson invested another $3 million developing and marketing Aurene, a planned community of more than 400 homes with stunning views of the Chemung River and nature trails to Corning's research lab. Houses were to sell for $200,000 to $500,000.
Today, Aurene looks more like a ghost 'burb. Empty lots and concrete foundations sit alongside the 64 homes that have been built. Jackson says he has so far recouped only about 60% of his initial investment; new construction has slowed to a crawl. "We'll wait it out. We don't have a lot of choice," he says.
In the past three years, Corning Inc. has regained its bearings; its stock is no longer trading around a dollar. As a result, Aurene is also recovering, although it may never fulfill its original plan. Realtors are doing business in Aurene. However, I'm still flabbergasted that those houses sell for as much as they do.
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