Hitting home.
With the housing market clearly favoring buyers, 
helloheather and I took a tour of two homes for sale back in December. The first was empty, as it was being sold by a relocation company. It was decent enough but did not strike us as the right fit.
The second, however, was still occupied but had a pending foreclosure. As we walked around, four young girls and their smiling parents stared at us from photos on the mantel and walls. The artwork of these girls decorated the fridge and their bedrooms. The family's cats sniffed us as we went by.
Our tour of the house threw my conceptualization of the problems in the housing marking right out the window. I find it hard to describe the feelings I had after we left the house, but depressed was certainly one of them. I don't know the details behind the foreclosure, nor do I want to find out. That's not the point. These four girls are innocent victims of something they had no control over.
What if something happened to my job and helloheather and I were unable to make house payments? What if we were faced with a foreclosure? The loss of our home, as a concept rather than a thing, would be (to me at least) devastating.
Perhaps I'm wrongly projecting my feelings of our home onto this family. Maybe they don't even like where they live. I rather doubt this, but I suppose it's possible.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I found a compassion for this family that weeks of statistics on the radio and online had been able to hide. I had become numb to the reality of this situation because the numbers being thrown around are too abstract. This experience has given me pause and my heart goes out to all those families that have been similarly affected.
February 14th, 2008 - 23:10
On the other hand, you have to ask yourself some questions, like: did they get a 0-down, no principle mortgage? Did they have a rainy-day fund? Did they plan for what they’d do if they lost their income?
There’s a lot of people losing their homes right now not because of bad luck, but because of their own mistakes.
BTW, I’m in town, probably all of next week too.
February 15th, 2008 - 12:34
It doesn’t matter, really, why they are lsoing their home to foreclosure. I think Rob’s point (and yours is a good one, too)is that these 4 children are innocent victims in what has become quite the epidemic.