Don’t let Boston and Brooklyn turn into Bangkok.

We apply a twisted sort of American exceptionalism to our ongoing economic meltdown. If it’s happening to us, it must be the worst, gnarliest, scariest, most toxic meltdown the world has ever seen. Of course in many ways we are right; the world’s interconnected financial system was conceived by American investment bankers who relied heavily on computers developed by American companies, Ph.D.s minted by American institutions, and societal conditions that led generations of American men with the Right Stuff to trade in Apollo Program slide rules for Wall Street squawk boxes.

We also, justly, insist on punishing or at least not rewarding those who profited from our losses. But while politicians endlessly debate whether zombie banks’ owners and bondholders will unduly profit from a bad bank, our financial system has been left open for infection by parasites. Opportunities to profit are going to the least deserving, as with PennyMac of Countrywide pedigree, to game the system once more. This is the price of our quest to create fairness where none is possible.

So we are watching as our own ghosts materialize. Smaller cities like Minneapolis; Charlottesville, Va.; and Sacramento, Calif.; are all dealing with half-finished hotels or shopping centers, boarded up as developers’ rationale and cash evaporated. There are, of course, acres of vacant homes all over Florida’s swamplands and Las Vegas’ deserts. These exurban projects could easily become ghost towns if credit to save them is not freed up. And the same credit crunch is making the prospect of ghost towers in our major cities very real.

New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago all have at least one major skyscraper in some stage of development death. New York—with major new towers in Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and Brooklyn on hold—has at least 30 sites where work has stopped. Boston has a 21-acre, $2.5 billion harbor development in limbo and a $700 million redevelopment of Filene’s Tower into downtown condominiums in financing purgatory. The Chicago Spire, designed by starchitect Santiago Calatrava as one of the tallest buildings in the world, has been a hole in the ground since October. Waterview Tower, the Windy City’s other stalled super-tall skyscraper, is stuck at the 26th floor.