If, after leaving off your 600 dollars a year cable bill, leaving off your extra 300 dollars a year for an extra phone line (long distance service is optional), cutting your "eat out" budget to the bone (avg american family spends at least 1500 dollars a year eating out), and other horrid brutal recommendations, we might have to do what we did when living in Beaumont TX when the oil boom busted. We walked away from the house. Was it painful and a waste of money? Yeah. Did it ruin us? No. It is called "being an adult and taking responsibility for the choices I make." Even when the results of those choices could not have been foreseen.
Now what happens if a couple million people pack up and leave Florida in 2007?
Even after trying to make it personal, you still didn't answer the question.
Maybe I gave you way too much credit when I thought you understood the situation.
But it seems that you are advocating that tens of thousands of residents pack up and leave their homes so that they can be 'responsible adults'.
Then what does that leave and what does that solve?
Oh, My God. I get it now. You got caught in that? I am from that area, and my visits home to my parents in the late 80's were heartbreaking. Their house lost half its value overnight. Whole neighborhoods were abandon, thousands of lives ripped up. It was hard to see. I am really sorry that you went through it. It must have been tragic. Beaumont's population shrunk by almost 15% by 1988, and home prices there took a decade to recover.