Editor’s note: Linda Hirshman is a retired professor of philosophy and the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. She is also an occasional commentator in forums such as The New York Times and the Washington Post. Starting this spring, she will be a political columnist for Double X, the women’s political online magazine.

President Barack Obama is coming to Arizona Wednesday to speak on the housing crisis. He could not have chosen a better place: Homes in Phoenix have lost 40 percent of their value since the peak in 2006 — the largest drop anywhere in the country.

Such statistics are chilling, but abstract. I understand President Obama plans to give a speech at a school in Mesa, but if the president has time to spare, he can come with me on a tour of what life is like on the ground in the post-crash city.

We can start with the Realty Death Walk around my formerly fancy neighborhood. (While he’s at it, he can meet my dog, Joie de Vivre, a big, frisky standard poodle, a perfect breed for the allergic first children.) Joy and I always take the same walk. On Monday, we discovered that another of the six-year-old “For Sale” signs on our route had been replaced by one that said “Reduced: Sale or Lease.” The first sale-or-lease house went on sale a couple of years ago, with the owners asking a cool million for what was essentially a teardown. Now it stands empty, a testament to greed and delusion, dragging down the feeling of the whole block, begging for a tenant or even a squatter, anyone to live in it other than the indigenous termites and pack rats. The new "Will Lease for Food" house is a lovely, big place with a great view and a pool. Standing empty since December. No sale.

Things are no different on the retail front. States like Arizona are full of ghost towns, old mining towns; the economic base has been drained dry. Tourists love to visit ghost towns for their Western movie setting, but it really gets scary when Phoenix starts to feel empty, too. Obama, the arugula candidate, might want to visit A.J.’s, the stunning upscale grocery store run by the local grocery chain — the only place in town with a reliable stock of fresh pomegranates, quinces and kumquats. Last time I went to A.J.’s for some item I could not get at the Costco, I was the only customer in the store. A couple of weeks ago the parent company announced it was laying off three percent of its workforce and closing five of its regular stores. I can’t offer him much opportunity to shop for little gifts for his wife either. The Borgata, a fanciful outdoor shopping mall built to resemble an Italian town, has gaping holes in the retail tenancy and not a soul in the shops that remain. Since the crash, the Borgata looks more like Italy right before the Huns than at the Renaissance.

I know the president likes to eat at Chicago’s Topolobampo, so the president and I might finish our day at Phoenix’s great gourmet Mexican establishment, the Barrio Café. The Barrio Café does not take reservations. For years, people came at five in the afternoon to eat chiles nogada or resigned themselves to waiting for a table in the bar drinking margaritas until they didn’t know if they were at the Barrio Café or the Taco Bell. But the president does not need to worry about keeping Air Force One waiting. We can come anytime now, including mañana.