Posted on 01/27/2008 7:14:50 PM PST by Comparative Advantage
The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed. This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.
Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.
A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.
Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.
The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.
At 9422 Chagrin Street, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: "Please Used."
After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments.
It is a complicated story. She refinanced in 2003, but did not realize the document she signed included provisions to radically increase the interest rate.
She stopped making payments in 2006 and shows her unpaid bills totaling 24,000 dollars.
Her bank is in the midst of eviction procedures.
"When folks buy a home they expect to die in it, I guess," she said as she stood outside in the cold. "I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare."
this has been handily debunked on another thread.
Oh, I must have missed it.
Thanks for letting me know.
She did not realize.
Why didn't she realize? Because she didn't read it, or she read it and didn't understand it?
If you don't "get" your loan docs why wouldn't you go buy a half hour's worth of time of a loan expert or an accountant TO FREAKING HELP YOU UNDERSTAND?
Ah yes, Tony deCorti sheds a tear.
Such drama queens.
Try Rhyolite, Nevada.
Now, I read this whole damn article, and it never made a single mention of ghosts.
;-)
LOL u teh funneh
Right around the corner from Destitute Drive and Agony Avenue.
Another vote for Hillary.....Then nothing helps... But gotta keep voting Democrat. It's only been 50 years.
Is he the guy that starred in that commercial back in the seventies? “Give a hoot, don’t pollute - SINK YOUR BEER CANS”
video of a guy holding a beer can (tin) under water, till it filled with water and sank.
I hear a recurrent theme that people who don’t live up to their contractual obligations are at fault. I tend to agree. However, where are these same people when corporations decide they don’t want to pay the pensions they agreed to? How is it that individuals have to operate intelligently and ethically, but corporations aren’t held to the same standard of conduct?
FWIW: I live in Shaker — the article is grossly incorrect.
That was the first thought I had when I saw the headline.
“However, where are these same people when corporations decide they don’t want to pay the pensions they agreed to?”
Can you provide one example of a corporation that just decides to stop paying pension committments?
The Breitbart site debunked it, too.
the adress must be 19422 chagrin blvd. this house has a foreclosure document on the window. many houses on chagrin blvd have these. this area is known as the lomond neighborhood. the houses are mostly two-family rental properties with just as many one-family homes that are located mostly on lomond blvd.
the shaker foreclosure situation is real. worst yet, there are more than 400 houses on the market that are barely selling. the house in live in is in the lomond area. the owners have had the house on the market for 3 1/2 years and no bites. the problem is location. on my street, there are 12 houses that are empty and for sale or in forclosure. it’s a rental area so the residents are mostly black. no one will buy here. the houses are quite lovely though. i love on the bottom floor of a two family. the top two floors are one unit which has 5 bedrooms and two full baths, hardwood throughout you name it. the problem is merely location—considering the foreclusre issue.
it is a ghostown of sorts in my area. cross the tracks (van aken blvd) and you have a different story. mostly white residents with large upscale colonials (single family) going for about 500,000. they sell homes quickly there. other areas such as fernway (also across van aken) have more modest homes and mostly white residents. homes go fro around 250,000 and up. they take a bit longer than the upscale homes to sell, but they sell pretty good too.
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