Hat tip to daytrip for sending this along, from the nytimes.com:
THE $26 billion foreclosure settlement deal announced this month arrived in the final throes of Hollywood’s annual awards season. It also arrived too late for my neighbor, a screenwriter and director who moved out of her two-bedroom house the week before last, after her bank foreclosed on the property.
There had been no “For Sale” sign, no telltale rental tenant, no evidence of anything untoward in our canyon neighborhood, an enclave of writers, directors and actors. I saw nothing until the night I stood on my front steps, my heart in my mouth, and heard her sobbing scream — “I’m 47 years old, and I am going bankrupt!”
Now she is gone, another “statistic,” as she put it when I went next door to say goodbye as the movers loaded the last of her belongings. Her eviction follows that of our mutual neighbors, actors on a well-known soap opera forced out of their house in a foreclosure in a driving rainstorm four days before Christmas. Their dark, vacant houses, emblazoned with the public notices taped in the windows like shameful scarlet A’s, are holes in the hidden, fraying social fabric of Hollywood, where a vast majority belong not to the 1 percent but to the 99.
Of the 11 million Americans under water on their homes and facing foreclosure, more than two million reside in California. None of the Hollywood guilds keep records of how many of their members are among them, but several unions and charitable performing arts foundations report an increase in members applying for emergency housing assistance. When two of my three immediate neighbors have been foreclosed on, there are undoubtedly untold screenwriters, actors, directors and others quietly, invisibly struggling to keep their homes.
Read more here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/opinion/foreclosure-story-untold-in-hollywood.html
I’m sorry, Jim, I honestly thought I had forgotten to hit “submit” the first time. I won’t attempt to repost my comment again. My apologies. 😳
Really interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing Jim.
It can happen to anyone, including those who do not think that it can happen to them.
Boo F-ing hoo. Nobody was forced to sign loan documents they couldn’t afford…. I’m sick of this crap. Where’s my part of the settlement? Oh wait, I pay my bills!
No surprise whatsoever. Even below-the-line Hollywood types live well beyond their means just to paint that “successful” image.
Interesting – ease up on the cussing and we’ll be fine.
Please, what drama. There are so many notices posted to your door telling you exactly when the eviction is coming and if you choose to ignore them and wait until the sheriff shows up then it’s your fault. Not sure how many Jim has had but we have had only 3 incidents where the occupants chose to ignore the one week posting by the sheriff that D-day was coming, and that was out of quite a few. Bank of America is giving most of these people a nice chunk of change and 30 days to move. Just gave out 5K to a 20 something tenant who was happy as a clam and another 7.5k for a 1900 square foot townhouse in Escondido. That’s it! I just figured it out, this is the way we are going to stimulate the economy, via Cash for Keys! Rant is now complete.
The only group these “victims” fall into is being victims of greed.
I didn’t see anything in this story about the neighbor being a subprime, liar-loan borrower. The focus appeared to be the impact of the economic downturn, and the contrast with the seeming glitz of the Hollywood image. I’m not even sure exactly what the lead-in about the foreclosure settlement had to do with this person, other than the fact that this person’s bank was one of the ones involved in the robosigning settlement.
Lots of people who had jobs, homes and mortgages they could afford and even some savings to fall back on have ended up in bankruptcy and foreclosure since their jobs evaporated. Some of them were probably greedy live-beyond-their-means types, but I try not to assume that they all are.
Will do, Jim. I’m not sure I even noticed that I was cursing. My excuse is that I had just read the Kamala Harris article below and before hitting your site I had read the full 54 page court doc on Kamala Harris’ settlement of the TFT-LCD price fixing class action suit (no mention of what consumers get, but 54 pages spelling out how much the trial lawyers and the state gets) and then hit this article.
Believe it or not, I’m a lot calmer than I was in 2008-2009. I’ll do a better job of holding onto my temper in the future. 🙂
My apologies again…
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