Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry shares his thoughts on foreclosure as part of our documentary "Facing the Mortgage Crisis."
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The first house I ever owned was a stylish 1950s ranch with a deep
backyard on a leafy suburban street. It had magnificent cathedral ceilings
and a fireplace.
This was in 1978. I had been married for a little over a year, and it cost what seemed like an astronomical amount of money.
Sixty-one thousand dollars. Somehow we came up with it, and made many memories in that house. Eventually, when I had outgrown it and had a different job, I moved to a bigger house.
But I've always been a little bit in love with that first one, in the way you always remember a first love, and a few weeks ago, I decided to find out what had happened to it.
To my shock, it was in foreclosure. I couldn't believe it. Thanks to the Internet, I found that it had last changed hands for $148,000, a couple of years ago. Now the bank wanted a mere $54,900 for it.
With inflation factored in, it was worth a less than a third of what I bought it for. I decided to go see the old place. The neighborhood was still nice. From the street, the house looked the same, or almost the same. The contours of the landscaping my wife had planned were still there, as were the Japanese maples she had planted, though they were overgrown. But the built-in barbecue in the back had been wrecked, apparently on purpose. An expensive fence was destroyed. The gutters were a mess, partly stripped and with trees growing out of them. A stained glass window had been smashed.
I met the lady next door. Who had been living here? I wanted to know. A woman and her son, she said. Eventually she died and he lost his job, and couldn't keep up with the payments. The bank wouldn't make a deal, she said, so he left.
I wondered if he had wrecked the barbecue on his way out. I felt as if I were looking at the corpse of a loved one.
The week before, I had bought another house with a close friend, who could not do so without a cosigner. That house had gone on the market for $399,000. She got it for $219,000, but though she has essentially perfect credit, she couldn't have bought it on her own.
"If she had bought this house five years ago, could she have gotten a loan?" I asked someone at the closing. "Your dog could have gotten a loan," he signed. "That was the problem."
Back then, I had a student who was suckered in to a no-interest mortgage with a balloon loan. Of course she and her husband lost the house. That's happening to thousands in this state, every month.
I don't know the solution. I only know we ought to find one. For years our government actively encouraged people to buy homes. Home ownership made for stable neighborhoods and societies. I think most elected officials still believe that. So why haven't we done more to keep those buyers in their homes when times get hard? If that isn't worth spending some money on, I don't know what is.
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