Don’t let Boston and Brooklyn turn into Bangkok.

Facing Armageddon, Thai banks had no choice and no mechanism by which to control their losses except to foreclose on developments they had financed. But with the entire system broken, they were unable to salvage repossessed developments or work out alternative financing for them.

Even if developers could have scared up new financing, there was hardly a reason to complete, for example, the Rama III complex, a riverside bank of four Class A office towers, in a country where white-collar business evaporated along with the value of the baht. And as the collapse created an uncertain political situation, the towers meant to be luxury-hotel complexes—in several cases agonizingly near completion—were also left to die.

State Tower, where we stayed, was completed in 2001 but stood nearly vacant until the Lebua hotel opened in 2003. The tower’s lower level was meant to be a multistory mall. Today the ground floor holds a bank, a masseuse, a tailor, a jeweler, and a Starbucks. The escalators leading up to five floors of never-occupied storefronts are permanently turned off. That the building was finished at all seems incredible. Yet today the baht has largely recovered along with Thailand’s economy.

State Tower was one of nearly 60 developments in Bangkok that was abandoned. The International Herald Tribune estimated that 508 developments in the city stalled due to the financial crises. Yet it wasn’t until 2001 that the Thai government created a bad bank, the Thai Asset Management Corp., to take over and redeem the toxic assets and investments that had poisoned the banking system there. For several years, as in Japan, Thai banks functioned as zombies, unable to do business and unwilling to reveal the true depth of their losses. In the meantime, Bangkok’s skyline rotted, and a handful of well-connected developers were able to leverage a collapsed economy and cheap labor to game the system.