Cute Bushwick house, by Shira Golding
Do the Subprime Whine: The Guardian comes to Bushwick and pours it on with one of those worst-case scenario subprime stories used to define the “crisis” by the hysterical media. Satan-incarnate “predatory” lender dupes simple old man out of his financial stability. And yet before the industry loosened its standards after decades of browbeating, the media would have wrung its hands that this old man didn’t have “access” to “important financial tools.” The article mentions in passing that he shares the blame for making poor decisions, but what nobody is mentioning is — where is all the money? He got a LOAN, and now he’s BROKE. Where did hundreds of thousands of dollars go? Gah!
‘Everything Is a Venue’ Indeed: Poking fun at the names of makeshift party spaces in Bushwick has become a pastime for this group of friends… I think I’ll start doing it, too. Next BBQ I’m at will be the “The Railroad Apartment Yard.”
‘Whiskey Dick’ Indeed: City boy probes “deep Bushwick” to sample our fair burg’s whiskey offerings.
Heckscher of a Garden: Miss Heather visits a surprisingly spiffy community garden in the Montrose area — it’s manicured walkways remind me of something tended by one of those Manhattan garden commandos. Good job, East Williamsburg!
Jimmy Legs August 11th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
ack that article is maddeningly uninformative. one might guess that all of the money he supposedly pulled out of his house went to his medical bills but then it makes his wife’s death and his 2 strokes are ‘extra expenses’ like cable TV or something. just as the article should get to the point where is EXPLAINS the facts of the predatory mortgage, it switches gears to complain about the high price of fuel oil?! did that sneaky lender jack up those prices too?
petebfd August 11th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
i dunno jl/jeremy, i think thats a pretty cynical response. maybe the article is trying to a ride a sensational hook of ‘america in financial crisis,’ but i do think lenders are largely predatory. come on, you don’t think mortgage brokers are prodded to push people into loans that might not be affordable for them? if only by the command from higher ups to “meet their target numbers.” the implied meaning of course being, meet your target numbers by any means necessary,” or “meet your target numbers, or else.” and the numbers always have to be bigger than last year. so, i think a lot of people did get taken for a ride, and things are pretty rough for alot of people right now. i think an article like this has its place, if, ultimately, it means that people will look at the financial system and be like, yeah, this is messed up, and they start to question why we need an economic system set up that requires a lot of people to lose. but maybe people are too cynical these days for the ‘woe is this guy’ story.
Steve August 11th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Jeremy–Maybe when you realize that its not only the guy in the article who got screwed–it’s the entire US public, which is basically passively watching as our government uses every remaining cent of taxpayers’ dollars to underwrite the selling off of our financial system to foreign capital–maybe then, you’ll be a little more sympathetic to the biggest victims of the subprime swindles. It isn’t the guy in the article whose getting billions of taxpayers dollars so he can get out of the financial hole he finds himself in–its various Wall Street players who are the ‘welfare queens’ here.
mopar August 11th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I can’t tell what this article is saying. A company that preys on elderly and perhaps naive homeowners convinced this man to take out a home equity loan with a balloon payment they did not disclose? Or the company got the man to turn over the deed and took the money themselves? This kind of scam does happen. (The New York Times wrote about a woman in Chicago this happened to last year. She also needed the money to pay for medical bills.) He already owned his home. This is different from what Jeremy brings up, the people who never would have qualified for a mortgage in the first place had standards not been relaxed.
ricmac01 August 12th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Some of the confusion is due to the fact that the original story about the “dirt farmer” (actually, deli worker since I doubt he did much dirt farming in Bushwick over the last 40 years) is about one year old. I guess the Guardian now revisits the story to let us know the old guy has now fallen prey to evil oil barons, tax collectors and shrewd pharmaceutical manufacturers. They could have titled the article, “Life’s a Bitch and then you Die” while playing Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” in the background. *sniff*
We’re all in the same boat. It would be nice if we could take better care of each other.
will August 12th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/
is a great blog about housing and the mortgage meltdown. They are cynical but not without any heart, and often dig below the surface of articles like the one in the Guardian. You should check it out. There are plenty of bad actors on both side but the lenders were totally out of control and deserve a lot of the blame.
will August 12th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I should also add that nowhere does it say he’s broke. It says he got a loan, now he can’t afford to pay off the loan. So he may be forced to sell his house. Maybe the house is worth more than the loan? Who knows. It’s true that the article is maddeningly vague, also true that Jeremy comes across as his usual heartless self.