The Extent to Which People Are Stressed Out About This Housing Crisis

I got an email the other day about Addie Polk, a 90 year old woman from Akron, OH who shot herself inside of a foreclosed home that she had refused to leave numerous times. In fact if her neighbor hadn't climbed into the residence to see what was going on she probably would no longer be with us. The home itself was 101 years old, it was foreclosed on last year and they tried to get into the residence over 30 times. She would always hide out and they would always go away.

I didn't think much of it as first; Cleveland has had the heaviest reported amount of foreclosures in the media and is used to illustrate what the housing crisis is doing to middle America. But these foreclosures are all over the country, and some of the more fascinating, though overly depressing stories have been about entire cities in California changing overnight or how the rich in Connecticut were suffering. Until now ...

There's no doubt that Addie Polk's story won't be used to get some relief to consumers who got caught up in all of this madness that need to be bailed out. If nothing else they should get some relief, not the businesses that created and sold and marketed these loans to them. I'm not sure that you can tell me with a straight face that you are okay with handing over your tax dollars to save these corporations when you don't have a mere fraction of the wealth they were generating on paper off of your backs. You can be as ideological as you want, if you're poor or lower middle class you are going to feel it in your pocketbook.

Addie Polk had her loan forgiven. But that doesn't console the millions of people out there who won't get any sympathy at all from the government or their lenders. Considering it was an old house that she had probably refinanced to keep up with the payments on a fixed income I don't think greed was a factor here. She did take out a small line of credit, but no real money, perhaps enough for repairs on the house, she only had that new loan for 3 years before they came knocking at her door trying to evict her.