It's So Bad, You Can't Even Give The House Away

Genevieve sent me this story :Banks Refusing To Take Back Foreclosed Properties.

Then I read All Boarded Up, which I wish everyone who is bitching and moaning about bailouts and people getting their lifestyles and poor decisions subsidized would read. It reminds me of the movie On the Beach, but it's not a cloud of radiation coming for everyone--it's urban blight. The article confines itself the the City of Cleveland proper, but the same problems are cropping up in the suburbs. There are 124 foreclosures in Lakewood, the nice walkable suburb that you live in if you want a city-like environment without the corrupt shenanigans and crime of Cleveland and don't mind paying high taxes to do so. Three are on my street. They are selling for less than $50,000. I paid $99,000 for my house in 2001.

Look, the Obama plan is kinda crap in terms of what needs to be done and what it might be able to do, but now is not the time to bitch that people are going to get something that you didn't. Now is the time to do something to plug the hole.

As for me, I had a discussion with a nice woman from the credit counseling agency that my mortgage company hired to talk to me and she is going to recommend to them they let me surrender the deed in liu of foreclosure, which I'm fine with. It saves my credit rating a bit; I had PMI on the loan so the lender would prefer to collect that and not be out the legal fees; and then it's over and gone and I can rebuild my credit.

I don't know how you can tell yourself Cleveland and the surrounding area is coming back and things will recover. It's like looking at the pictures of the Ninth Ward after Katrina, or Beruit after the latest war. Yes, you may find yourself a hipster enclave with urban gardens but that cloud of blight spreads. What are Cleveland's prospects, its strengths that secure its future? Because honestly, I can't figure out how it's not a few sunny people in denial of what will happen.