My job is to watch dreams die (2011)

I&#x27;ve had a handful of lemons thrown at me during my life. One of the most impactful ones as far as I can tell is that through a weird chain of coincidences I ended up first in line to purchase a foreclosed home. From what I understood, the couple was going through a nasty divorce and couldn&#x27;t agree on who would get the house and ultimately didn&#x27;t pay anything for a while, so I picked it up for 80k, which back then was probably 50% of what the market value was. This was hige for kme because as a kid my family was actually evicted from the house we were renting (not for financial-related reasons) but it was sudden so home security has always been important to me.<p>Having been able to pay off my house has had the most tremendous postive impact on my mental health I think. Sure, it&#x27;s a small house, and it&#x27;s old, and the kitchen is small, and so on... but man, I&#x27;m so glad I never have to worry about making a house payment.

During this same time period I had a project at a part-time gig which involved updating document templates and adding a few fields here and there for a legal application. The application was used by a law firm which specialized in mortgages. So I saw the details of various documents one is served in these situations: notice of default, acceleration notices, notice to vacate, and ultimately evictions and foreclosure auctions. And of course you could see thousands of these documents being generated and mailed out. For a guy like the one in the post to show up, you probably would have had to completely ignore probably a dozen of these documents for at least 6 months, not paying your mortgage all along.<p>Sometimes I feel like this experience, especially the idea that the entire principal balance can be accelerated if you don&#x27;t make your payments regardless of the value of the house, left a bit of a scar on me that caused me to miss out on the ZIRP real estate boom II. But I am still happy with the way things are turning out overall.

I&#x27;ve seen a few sides of money. Raised upper class, lost it all and became underclass, then made it back. I&#x27;m always amazed at how limited rich people&#x27;s worldview is. The average software developer, coastal liberal etc. They&#x27;ve never felt terror, the visceral feeling of being terrified. They&#x27;ve never been predated upon. They&#x27;ve never been used and discarded. The underclass lives with this stuff every day, 24&#x2F;7, and rich people never experience it even once in their whole lives. And the rich people presume to talk down to and lecture the poor. I have a great deal of contempt for people of my class, the rich.

“And so I listen. I feign dispassion but I&#x27;m not fooling anybody. Somehow they can tell that I care and thank me even as they admit that it isn&#x27;t my fault, that it isn&#x27;t my responsibility to listen. I&#x27;ve stood inside another&#x27;s dream for an hour as they spoke, not really to be heard but to say goodbye - to leave the ghosts behind.”<p>A nice reminder that, in literally every possible situation, even just a little bit of kindness and humanity can go a long way.

When my ex-wife and I were first house shopping in Chicago, we looked at a handful of short sales¹ and I am still haunted by the site of one defeated homeowner sitting on the sofa of his home as we looked around his home deciding if we wanted to buy it.²<p>⸻<p>1. For those who don’t know, a short sale is one step up from foreclosure: The homeowner and lender agree to a sale for less than the outstanding balance on the mortgage. The buyer must not be related to the seller and the seller does receive a few thousand dollars of the sale proceeds. On the flipside, the amount of the mortgage that is not paid off is considered income and the seller must pay taxes on that.<p>2. We ended up not buying any of the short sale homes in the community where we were looking, but instead purchased a home that was a traditional sale.

I worked the other side of this thing, as a debtors&#x27; bankruptcy attorney. Sometimes I could save the house but usually it wasn&#x27;t in the cards: The income wasn&#x27;t there and the bankruptcy laws were skewed by GWB. Fortunately there were many times when - if a house wasn&#x27;t an issue - the debtor was much better off without an albatross around his neck. Overall it was a rewarding occupation - not monetarily, the rules kept debtor&#x27;s attorneys on a very short leash - but morally.

I have spent about 20 years in the mortgage and housing industry, a decent amount of that in servicing and default. I have seen some shady shit including borrowers who committed mortgage fraud and lenders who made loans they knew would ultimately blow up in someone&#x27;s face (not theirs!).<p>That said, 99% of defaults are very simple: At the time of the loan, the borrower could afford to make the mortgage payment. Later down the road, something changes in their circumstance, and they can no longer afford to make the monthly payment (or anything close enough to work out a deal). The most common reasons are a loss of income or severe medical issues.<p>Mortgage servicers and investors almost never want to foreclose on a home. An extended default leading to a foreclosure is very costly, and the servicer is usually fronting the money to the investor the entire time. Everyone loses when a foreclosure happens (though only one party doesn&#x27;t have a home anymore).<p>I am profoundly sympathetic to anyone who gets evicted, but lenders only make mortgage loans because the property is collateral. How else would someone front a normal borrower hundreds of thousands of dollars?

My parents build a big ass house in the middle of nowhere around the year 2000<p>It was a nice place! rooms for the kids, a pool, etc.<p>Then 2008 hit. WOW. We went from a prosperous family to NOTHING incredibly fast.<p>This asset was so toxic the bank wouldn&#x27;t even fucking take it. It was an albatross for YEARS and my parents had to liquidate their 100 year old family business, and all other assets before they could wiggle out from under it in 2014.<p>For little podunk rust belt towns, there was no &quot;recovery.&quot; The car parts plant was gone. The tire plant was gone. The steel casting plant was gone. EVERYTHING went to Mexico. Why buy a nice place if there is no job to support it?<p>That house now sits empty out on a lot next to a closed down golf course. So it goes

The tragedy is even sadder when you find out that the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession were self-inflicted by the Federal Reserve and CFPB after 2007, not the inevitable result of reckless borrowers. Kevin Erdmann has been studying this for about a decade and gives examples of cities such as Atlanta that had no housing boom at all but were forced into foreclosure crisis. Here is his most recent op-ed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;05&#x2F;housing-crisis-mortgages-kamala-harris-plan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;05&#x2F;housing-c...</a>

(2011)<p>Some discussion then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2959137">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2959137</a>

Man, Reddit used to be amazing before it got TikTok-ified. Super high quality content (like this); a lot of which was real. Why can&#x27;t we have nice things?

Reminded me of this story that makes me chuckle when i first read it where the tables were turned. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;bank-america-florida-foreclosed-angry-homeowner-bofa&#x2F;story?id=13775638" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;bank-america-florida-foreclo...</a>

There needs to be some standard addendum attached to homes as an option that anyone selling a home can attach to the sale. Something like:<p>This house cannot be used as an investment vehicle. It cannot be sold by a real-estate agent with a contract of more than 1%. It cannot be used as a rental. It cannot be sold for more than inflation would allow.<p>Anyone found violating this addendum may be sued. All proceeds from the lawsuit (after fair lawyer fee of 40%) shall be used to build new homes (as in it can only be used to fund actual building materials, not generic non-profit companies).<p>This might not be the best approach, but we need a home renaissance that redefines home ownership across the world so that no one has to be homeless anymore.

Many of the comments in that Reddit thread are heartbreaking. Ouch.

I helped a co-worker evict a guy who had been missing and short rent payments on and off for over a year. Less than a year later the evictee passed away living rough on the street and unsheltered.<p>His wife had divorced him a while earlier, and by the time he was evicted the carpet was filled with dog poop and pee, some partially cleaned up, some not.<p>The guy was an accountant. One would assume that a professional like that would be able to get access to help; would be able to figure out what&#x27;s going on and change course.<p>I don&#x27;t know or remember enough of his story to really make a point. It sucks that he died. It sucks that I&#x27;m part of a chain of events that accelerated that. It sucks that people get drawn into things like gambling and drugs. It sucks that people are unhoused in a country with access to a surplus of resources.<p>By the time someone gets to intensive care in a hospital, a nurse can &#x27;save their life&#x27; 5 times in a night, just for them to die the next day. This guy could have lived more years, but it&#x27;s really hard to know what those years would have been.

He reminds me of Death from Discworld. He is the Dream Reaper.

I have become cynical on Reddit to the point that I don’t know if these stories are real or just really good creative writing

Terrific writing even if difficult to read. This hits close to home, my family and relatives left our homes because of a war, we were on the wrong side of the fence. The experiences of these people are not much different. Maybe we can do better in the 21st century.

This reads like way before 2011. Just the mention of phone books puts the time frame into the late 90s early 2000s. I haven’t seen a phone book for at least 20 years.

In Portugal, you can take a mortgage with an optional insurance to exempt you from payments if unemployed up to 6 months.

The subject is heartbreaking, but the writing is superb.

That was an unexpectedly well-written post.

So this must be (one of the undoubtably many reasons) why our transatlantic friends are trying to push the self-destruct button since 2016. Reads like dystopian fiction. Canis canem possidet.