Still going strong, there's 5 full pages of notices of defaults in my local Elk Grovian newspaper this week. I'm pretty sure the Elk Grove Citizen paper is hanging on largely due to the revenue produced by banks (or whoever it is) that are required to post these in a public record three times. It's good news for newspapers and banks...bad news for homeowers.
Yep, you read that right -- home owers. The notices this week were varied, from 2004 to 2009. I wonder how it is that there are people who managed to pay on a mortgage for almost eight years and now are going to foreclose. I will never know the individual circumstances, but I'd wager that cash-out refinancing had just a little something to do with it.
While failing to pay a mortgage may be something of a moral issue, it is exactly what we should expect given the way we reward behavior in an economic system built for private gain. The consequence of this is why, in my little Elk Grovian "neighborhood," we'll have a nicely manicured lawn right next door to four foot tall weeds with a leaning "for sale" sign and "default notices" in the windows. Neighbors are not necessary in such an economic environment; they mean nothing.
When neighbors mean nothing there really is no concept of a neighborhood any longer, yet we still call it this for some reason. I suspect that most of us don't want to interact with those directly around us, and it's quite interesting to observe. But I do believe that it has more to do with the way we've arranged suburbia than most people would argue, even though people don't want to interact with their neighbors in mid to large cities, either. We don't have to. So we don't.
I've spent the better part of the last two weeks on my roof fixing dry-rotted fascia around several new windows. This morning I can hardly walk down the stairs, having gone up and down the ladder fifty times yesterday. We had a significant water ingress problem over all our south facing exposure which led to the removal of interior sheet rock to replace damaged structural studs.
From a person who genuinely values maintenance, I deferred it until it became somewhat more expensive to repair. Granted, it was going to be expensive regardless, but had I addressed the bad fascia 5-8 years earlier it may have been just fascia. My point is, I have a bad feeling about the rest of my neighborhood (filled with unknown neighbors), now 20 years old, and I wonder about the condition of others' housal units filled with people who care even less about maintenance or who simply are in so much mortgage debt that maintenance is the last priority. My experience is that those with means will simply find newer units to move to, because as the neighborhood is meaningless anyway and as maintenance is a difficult and constant undertaking, it's easier to simply move farther out to the newer units. And my experience is that absentee landlords, whether they be banks or actual humans, perform the absolute minimum, too.
What will my neighborhood become in another ten years?
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Musings of an Elk Grove, CA Social Critic
3 comments:
Hi Insania, My name is Felicia and I edit Elk Grove Patch, a new local news website. I've been enjoying your witty and occasionally grumpy reports on gas prices, neighbors and other Elk Grove-related themes. Would you like to reach more people with your words by blogging for our site? Please contact me at felicia.mello@patch.com. Thanks!
The real estate problems will persist for at least three more years. Prices will continue to fall, yet we will someday have a new Super Wal Mart for all these empty houses, and another empty retail space when Wal Mart closes their old store on EG Blvd.
Brilliant!
Felicia, I am most flattered by your request, but jeez, I'm most certainly far too "grumpy" to post on Elk Grove Patch! I have seen your site often before, and again over the past week since your comment I've looked over your commentary on local affairs.
Not that I couldn't tame things down, I guess, but I suppose that I find it too enjoyable monologuing to myself about things that I hold dear and I do so in a way that I'm sure really doesn't relate to the vast majority of our neighbors. I try to wrestle energy into every post and wrestle out how our social arrangements squander that important resource. This viewpoint may be unique but it can alienate a lot of people; that's why I'm on my own little blog and not elsewhere.
When that Wal-Mart closes on Elk Grove Blvd., and you can be assured it will someday as cheaper land on the southern fringes and a drooling city council seeking tax revenues make it financially attractive -- there will almost certainly be restrictions on what types of businesses can occupy that vacant space...and those restrictions almost always dictate that mass retailing cannot occur there for a set period of time. So much for our "free-market" economy. Take a look at the shell of the old WalMart near Franklin and Florin -- now some two years vacant. A mega church? A roller rink? It's not either as it makes no sense to do anything with it other than mass retail, but it cannot be used by another big box retailer because there's a covenant on that property. This is the curse of suburbia -- the core hollows out while the farther fringes attract new money.
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