Foreclosure Tourism
If you think driving by a series of For Sale signs in your neighborhood is sobering, consider what a closer look might hold.
I took a tour of foreclosed homes in Tacoma, Washington recently. These were homes that had gone through the foreclosure auction process. They didn’t get any bids there so their ownership reverted back to the banks.
The For Sale sign is familiar, perhaps too familiar, but it is no preparation to what lies behind the door.
These houses have been empty for at least six months. Some longer. Most of them much longer.
We might be accustomed to foreclosure news stories and statistics, but one step inside one of these abandoned homes rips the curtain from the illusion that foreclosure is merely an abstraction.
Foreclosure is no abstraction.
In some houses, you must step over or through unfinished projects, once loved gardens filled with weeds and various other emblems of the ache of an abandoned home.
For the most part, these houses are cleaned out, but there are remnants that speak volumes.
Emptiness is never total.
The child’s shoe, left in the back of a closet, the bag of cat food left on the refrigerator or the yearly growth marks on a door frame speak of the life that had filled these now barren houses.
Foreclosure is no abstraction. Every foreclosed home represents a family in crisis - a family in debt, usually homeless and with ruined credit. And many neighborhoods have more than their share of these standing vacant stares on their streets. These forlorn neighborhoods are magnets for vandalism and the perfect medium for both social and structural disintegration.
In a fire or other emergency, people grab their most valuable possessions. In a foreclosure, we see the opposite end of that equation - the least valuable objects are left behind.
Even under normal circumstances, every object in a home tells a story. As we all, in almost every neighborhood, try to make sense of what is happening around us, we look at the For Sale signs, talk to our neighbors and watch or read the news. We hear opinions, some insightful, some helpful or even hopeful, but many are snide and condescending.
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Every crisis, and this is a crisis by any definition, brings out the best - or the worst - in those who try to isolate causes or future preventative measures. The crassest, and most callow, are those who, at least initially, placed the blame on those who “bought more home than they could afford”. Besides the mathematical absurdity (does anyone really think a few thousand defaulted home loans could bring down a world economy?) there is the pragmatic reality that virtually all of us, with pay cuts or job losses find ourselves in “more home than we could afford”.
This simplistic - and vindictive - analysis, mostly from talk radio hosts with multi-million dollar salaries, does little to help us make sense - or deal with - an immensely difficult and complicated situation - one that reverberates from the headlines to the house next door.
There’s a old saying among those who work with the homeless that we are all, no matter how middle class, merely three paychecks from being homeless. And that was true several years ago. We have all, no matter how prudent we might have been, moved several steps closer to that brink in the past year or so.
One of the many ironies in our current economic mess is the silence of people of faith - these are the people who make a public profession of compassion and restoration. But where are they? Where are the voices of hope? Where are the groups who were so eager to “protect the American family” a few months ago now that families from virtually every neighborhood have been evicted and scattered across couches and tent cities across our country?
The Bible is not silent when it comes to these armchair pontificators. Consider this verse - “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.” Matthew 23:14 (New King James)
Every empty home, every tangled and overgrown lawn, holds a story. In fact, every empty home holds a series of stories; one about those who used to live there and one about those of us who look on from our own emptiness.
We are awash in explanations and blame. There is a cloud of grief and rage that hangs over our neighborhoods.
But as we might step, or even just peer, into an empty, cold and damp house, what says more than the broken toy left in an upstairs closet? Or a bag of cat food left on the fridge?
Posted on June 15, 2009 10:15 AM
Comments
Thanks for this post, as a resident of Detroit, MI, this is all too familiar. And as an urban planning student, I am glad to be reminded that these homes may be static, but the people who lived in them or still live in them are dynamic. I pray the Church can help each other out during this time: foreclosed, homeless, sheltered, housed, or simply broken.
Posted by: David Mieksztyn | June 18, 2009 1:09 PM
I have read your article several times and understand what you are saying. My brother is about to loose his house after the economy went in the tank, he has always made his payments on time, his business is failing, yet no one will help him. It is truely troubling.
Yet your article, as impassioned as it was, was all light and no heat. You wrote wonderfully impassioned words, but what are you trying to say? You offer no analasis, no comentary, no solutions. You point to the "silent" church, which is true, but then you dont give examples, or solutions. Pick up a copy of a movie called "The Player" (a great movie by the way)with Tim Robbins. Go to the funeral scene where this guy is euligizing the writer who was murdered. He essentially says nothing, and it reminded me of your article, impassioned, but with no real light. What are we supposed to be stired to? You never answer the question. Why is the church failing? You never give a illustrations or solutions. Are they supposed to rent building to house people? What are you asking? Your obviously a good writer, and you clearly sad, and angry about this. But other than crying out for the displaced, what now? Are you helping the displaced yourself? If you are you dont say so. You talk about all of the "tent cities" that these people are in, but you give no personal examples. I will bet that if you followed up on most that you saw, they are living in apt., or with relatives or something else, but we dont know because you have nothing back up your agrument. You came across as if you have not even actually talked to any displaced families. Have you? I look foward to reading more of your work in the future, but say something. Shed some light. "Throw me a bone".
Posted by: Greg Johnston | June 18, 2009 6:57 PM
I must admit that Greg's comments left me a bit puzzled.
I am more than a bit leery of "commands" built into observations. Even Jesus, in the quote I used, and in many other instances, assumed a high level or personal/individual discretion in how to respond. Isn't that the core of free will?
I love the concept of free will and worry about the longing to be controlled. God expects far more from us than moral 'lessons' - wouldn't we all agree that he expects us to act as free moral agents.
This article was a set of my observations. Any response, except evasive complacency, done with integrity, might be appropriate. The good Samaritan is our example - not the avoidance of the other two more "religious" figures.
Christopher Rowland in his article "William Blake liberates the Bible for the people"
(http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/6386)
makes this comment -
"Blake loved the Bible because it acted as a stimulus to an imaginative engagement with society and also with the nature of God. Blake wrote that what he wanted to do in his art and poetry was "rouze the faculties to act". That meant empowering the readers and hearers of texts and pictures to have the courage of their convictions and not be dependent on the experts to tell them what a text or picture meant. The Bible fulfilled this function as well as any other text, because it was "addressed to the Imagination ... and but mediately to the understanding or reason". "
I am not interested in Biblically based "directives" - in fact nothing scares me more.
The inherent fascism of many churches - and para-church organizations - has been all too obvious.
I'll take God's free will any time. He expects us to be grown ups - and yes it gets messy and difficult, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Posted by: Morf | June 26, 2009 8:41 AM
I am as puzzled by your observation, as you seem to be over my response, espically regarding "free will". Where does that fit in to what I was asking? I was not trying to direct you, just figure out what you are trying to say. Even abstract art is titled. Did you mean your work to just be words on a page, like a kind of abstract? I am also not sure where the your idea of "commands" come in. I dont think I was expecting you to command anything based on your article. I was trying to figure out if you had a point, or were just wondering around. Based on your response, you were just wondering around. Now that I understand, it is ok. Anyone can stand back and look at a painting (or empty house) and make observations, but how does it stir you, and is that supposed to "stir" us. I, like you love Blake's observation, but the key words in it seem to be "stimulas to an imaginative engagment". I guess when I read your article it failed to "empower" me to realize anything. As I watch my brother loose his house that it took him a lifetime to build, that stirs me. Not to fight the someone "enemy" but to realize my brother, as a person, who is affected deeply, and the heart break of it. Maby that was the connection I was hoping for in your article. A shoe in an empty room tells me nothing, a shoe that was once a girls shoe helps me see all facets of the heart break. In the end you talked about the "fascism" of churches, which you illuded to in your article, again no doubt true, but you throw it out there without any observations about how that "fascism" relates to the empty house. Now that you have explained what you were doing, I understand, but rather than make your article become more alive, it makes it more lifeless. And yes, life is messy, so help us see the impact of the messyness, because I wouldnt have it any other way.
Posted by: Greg | July 7, 2009 11:25 PM