Thursday, May 01, 2008

House Hunting in the Inland Empire



As Erik mentioned when he introduced me, I’m headed to Redlands, California from Austin this summer to take a position at the University of Redlands. I am in the fortunate position of being able to actually afford a house in Southern California on an Assistant Professor’s salary—something not even thinkable in the area two years ago. The silver lining of the credit collapse and subsequent fall in housing prices in markets like California is that homes are approaching affordability to working class people (there is still a very, very long way to go; the average price for a home in California is around $400,000 [down from $528,000 a few years ago], while the median family income is around $49,000 per year). The home prices in Redlands and the surrounding area are MUCH lower than the state average. In the long view, this is a good thing (not just for me, but for working class people who otherwise would remain priced out of the market); for those who have lost their homes, though, this is a very uncertain and undoubtedly miserable time.

I was in the Inland Empire a few weeks ago to look at houses. The human toll of the foreclosure boom is not immediate when reading about it in the media, but becomes painfully apparent the minute you step inside one of these houses. All but one of the houses I looked at with the realtor were bank owned foreclosures. Most of these houses are in terrible condition; many have been stripped of anything with the slightest value—light fixtures, window treatments, banisters, etc. In one house, even the switch plates and outlet plates were unscrewed from the wall and taken. A few houses, displaying evidence of a very understandable and very human reaction, even had intentional damage—sliced carpet, large holes in walls, even broken windows. The feeling when you step into one of these homes is an overwhelming sense of loss and desperation. For a moment, you can imagine the final hours before eviction and sense the horrible strain that these families had to endure. One home still had a few bags of clothes and a box of toys left behind in the foyer, just feet from the front door. It was heartbreaking and left me with a strange sense of voyeuristic guilt.

These people weren’t necessarily just greedy—these were mostly normal, working class people who saw their neighbors make thousands of dollars on their houses, move up to bigger and better houses, and wanted to do the same. I’m not totally dismissing the greed impulse here, but I can hardly fault most of these people for wanting to get their slice of the pie as well. Couple that with the abuses and flat-out lies of an eminently culpable and predatory mortgage industry, and I have reason to feel a great deal of sympathy for the people who were shuffled out of their own doors. Especially the ones who left the toys behind (that was rough).

(The picture is of a pool for a bank-owned foreclosure that has been vacant for over a year, and part of my finger [I can't take pictures for shit])