Home Equity Loans and the upside down dingy.

Just up the street from my 1960's built house are brand new, trendy designed, but ultimately cookie-cuttered box homes.  This neighborhood has a road layout that attempts to be idle and meandering, in an attempt to be quaint and sophisticated, but ultimately so reinforces my opinion that this place is ultimately soulless.


First off, this isn't a Rambling regarding the quality of the people; the people all seem to be perfectly pleasant individuals, although the Lonely Ice Bucket incident concludes some of their kids might need a swift kick in the ass.  No, when it comes to these people, I actually feel for a lot of them.  Thinking about their home equity and their home loans makes me feel for these people.

When the neighbor hood was first built, like most good Californians did, they flood to the new Pacific Northwest to get away from their own bloated housing markets (we'll ignore the fact they inadvertently caused mine to bloat in return) and into "affordable" housing.  Leaving your LA shanty and being able to buy outright a multi-story, multi-room house seemed like a dream for some of these people.  Many others weren't so lucky to have that kind of equity in their hands when they sold their homes.

When the neighborhood first went in, the "beggar board" toted the luxurious homes (again; soulless boxes, even the color choices are depressing) as high quality and totally worth the nearly $400,000 investment for an entry-level homecube.

Know what the signs reads now?  "Luxurious homes starting at $179,000!"  Wait, double take!  What?!  I made a point of walking through this neighborhood and counting what I call upside down dingies.  When your boat flips over, you're sort of in trouble.  When you owe more on your home than the home is worth, well, sometimes people end up getting stuck under the water. :/

I recognize many of the people who're still living there as some of the initial buyers.  I can only speculate that these are the people who had enough Cali-cash to buy the homes outright and through either stubbornness, pride, or shell shock, are unwilling to give up the fact that they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I also saw a lot of houses with key-filled envelopes taped to the front doors...