Ebony's Pearls

The Hollow Tree Occupied by Itzl
Originally uploaded by nodigio

I know, I keep talking about this, but did you know that 71,563 homes were foreclosed upon just last month?

That's 71.653 people made homeless in just one month. So far this year, 363,000 homes were foreclosed upon, according to RealtyTrac.

We're only halfway through the year and already almost half a million people have lost their homes.

Some states are harder hit than others, with some cities having as many as 40% of their homes in foreclosure. Across the country, one out of every 200 houses is in foreclosure. That's up 75% so far from even a year ago, when it was up 97% from the previous year, and it's not showing signs of slowing down.

There are a few states (Vermont, Maine, South Dakota...) that don't seem to be having any issues, but the other 47 states are. People living in Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, or Colorado are among the worst hit. In the end, this may be a Good Thing, since home prices were over-inflated. But while it's happening, it's a Very Bad Thing for the people living through it.

I wouldn't be quite so bothered if it was the owner of the home alone who was affected, but many of the people facing homelessness from this aren't the people who bought the house. They're renters, often people who've been paying their rent faithfully and on time each and every month, and because the landlord over-reached themselves, they are now without options - banks don't want to be landlords and prefer eviction to renting.

Many renters are either not in a position to buy the house they're renting or not given the option to buy. Their first indication there's a problem is when the sheriff shows up with the eviction notice.

All of you who are renters, check with your landlords and find out how secure your home is. Even an ironclad rental contract is meaningless in a foreclosure. Don't let yourself become one of the increasingly large number of homeless people. Speaking from personal experience, that's not a place you want to be. Do what you can to be sure it doesn't happen to you.

As public as the outcry is about this crisis, it still doesn't seem to directly affect most people. I mean, one in 200? How many of us have 200 friends? We may not know anyone directly who has or is losing their home, so it's a remote crisis, one among many crises like the fires of California, the floods in mid-America and Burma, earthquakes in China and elsewhere, tornadoes, and hurricane season is gearing up. Those seem more important and immediate than one in 200 people losing their home. And we can do something about natural disasters because large groups of people are involved all at once. In this foreclosure disaster, it's a private, individual thing, one home at a time all across the country. You never know who will be hit next and as a community, we feel shattered by our inability to know when and who and what to do.

Simple things like giving a renter the option to buy the property or to have a reasonable time in which to vacate the premises (and 60 - 90 days seems a reasonable time to me to allow an innocent family time to find a new place and move), returning any deposits to the renters before they move so they can afford to move so quickly, and even establishing a fund to assist displaced renters to move - waiving utility deposits, assisting in rental deposits, and even offering coupons, rebates, and discounts for moving trucks and packing materials would all ease some of hte issues.

I know this because some of the people I've been helping on Sandwich Saturdays only need a little bit, usually in the form of deposits, to get re-homed. Setting up a Modest Needs type agency to help them isn't an impossible thing to do. I don't understand why so few communities have started their own Modest Needs type organization just for these kinds of hardships.

The whole point here is that we really are all affected by these foreclosures and there is something we can do about it. We can protect ourselves, we can make sure our renting friends are safe from such problems, and we can encourage our communities to create a Modest Needs type organization to help those caught in these kinds of hardships.