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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
The Mortgage Crisis on a Human Scale
Even if you haven't been personally effected by foreclosure, it's hard to escape the reach of the mortgage crisis. News reports of displaced people across the country, lured in by easy financing only to be pushed out by skyrocketing interest rates, stories of normal Americans who have lost their homes, are all too common. These are the “everyday people” Tavis frequently mentions, many of them hardworking, ambitious citizens, striving for their promised share of the American dream.
What the news can't usually offer us, however, are in-depth portraits of the mortgage crisis on a person-by-person level. It's easy to see the situation in terms of numbers, of houses repossessed, of people forced out; what is far more difficult is to see this as a story of people.
In the October issue of Harper's magazine, a story by Paul Reyes attempts to do this, with profound results. "Bleak Houses: Digging Through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis" tells the story of Reyes' experience “trashing out” foreclosed homes, that is, removing the left-behind possessions of the previous inhabitants. In his account of his time spent doing this, Reyes is able to tell the human story of the mortgage crisis in startling detail. Working in Florida, one of the hardest-hit states, in which at one point 35,000 homes were being reclaimed every month, he details his experience of the phenomenon, which he describes as “surreal in its proportion, biblical in its egalitarian reach, like an economic cleansing fire.”
Reyes' story does what narrative journalism does at its most effective, brings a large topic down to the scale of a single human being. It also does what stories in Harper's do at their very best, convey the poetry of the mundane, so that an otherwise unremarkable act like clearing garbage from an abandoned home, or the conversation between two laborers, becomes something far more than the sum of its parts. In "Bleak Houses," the conversations between his coworkers are heavy with unspoken metaphor, laden with dark absurdity, at times recalling dialogue from a Beckett play.
Through descriptions of a homeowner killing himself as a sheriff arrived to evict him, of swarms of tenacious fleas, homes both pristine and squalid, all abandoned quickly, and of the clearing out of “a house new enough that it had been built, bought, lived in, and lost before the garage was even finished,” Reyes provides a rare glimpse inside the crisis.
Through interviews with realtors, speculators and former homeowners, Reyes begins to describe how this was allowed to happen. He doesn't, however, get too far into the economic nuts and bolts of what created the situation; we've all heard about that by now. Rather, he reports from the ground on the human impact of the mortgage crisis. It is passages like this that particularly drive the gravity of the situation home:
“Hearing [one former homeowner's] panicked voice, one could understand the depth of this crisis in a way that the business pages failed to convey. One could simply multiply her desperation by tens of thousands—leagues upon leagues of homeowners trapped in pathetic confusion, having been upended by their desire, taught as a tenet of good citizenship in America, to own something permanent; in this case, a house that was now practically worthless, that merely marked a spot for bulldozers when it came time to widen the interstate.”
It is a remarkable and moving read, and for anyone seeking a glimpse of human impact of our country's current economic doldrums, it brings the reality home.