Wednesday, October 01, 2008
The Bottom
Paul Reyes' essay in the October Harper's, "Bleak houses: Digging through the ruins of the mortgage crisis," offers a fascinating and horribly depressing picture of what the mortgage crisis looks like from Ground Zero, as it were. Reyes' father operates a crew out of Tampa whose job is to break into (usually deserted, but sometimes not) foreclosed homes, clear out mind-boggling messes of left-behind garbage, and get the houses ready to be placed back on the market (by the banks who now own them) or on the block at these insane foreclosure auctions. Reyes' father works as a kind of team with his second wife, who is a foreclosure agent for a bank. Reyes travels home to work with his father and crew on these jobs, and the essay is an account of these experiences.
One fascinating angle is the trans-class aspect of the crash: while most of the homes in this account are low-end, a good deal are also condos and McMansions. Also, while most of the former homeowners were people who got scammed into shady adjustable-rate loan deals, some are themselves scammers--e.g., a party from New York who came down to Florida, bought a condo, took out a whole string of loans, squeezed every penny of equity out of the property (and actually more than every penny, to the extent that the loans added up to well over the market value of the home), and then defaulted on everything and scampered back to New York, leaving the lenders holding their respective bags and the Reyes family to clean up the mess.
Amazing.
posted by Blicero : 10/01/2008 06:45:00 PM
One fascinating angle is the trans-class aspect of the crash: while most of the homes in this account are low-end, a good deal are also condos and McMansions. Also, while most of the former homeowners were people who got scammed into shady adjustable-rate loan deals, some are themselves scammers--e.g., a party from New York who came down to Florida, bought a condo, took out a whole string of loans, squeezed every penny of equity out of the property (and actually more than every penny, to the extent that the loans added up to well over the market value of the home), and then defaulted on everything and scampered back to New York, leaving the lenders holding their respective bags and the Reyes family to clean up the mess.
Amazing.
posted by Blicero : 10/01/2008 06:45:00 PM
