I'd Heard About It But Now I've Seen It...Massive Foreclosures

Living in rural Oklahoma can leave you a little isolated at times. Isolated from pop culture, from city life, and the reality of a tumbling housing market. I've spent the last few weeks in California and although I'd heard about entire neighborhoods being foreclosed on, you can't quite fathom it until you actually see all the for sale signs with your own two eyes.

My cousin, Holly, and my friend, Sheri, both live near Sacramento. Today, I went for a run through the park and through some of the adjoining neighborhoods; quiet neighborhoods, with cute stucco and rock homes. The sad reality is that as I ran through one addition, where the houses are so close together that you have to share a communal mailbox, I counted over a dozen homes with either "For Sale" or "Bank Owned" signs on them, or houses that were in the process of being foreclosed on with key locks on the front doors and signs in the windows, saying "Do not trespass".

Just in the block around Holly's house, I counted 10 homes that have been foreclosed. That's 10 families who couldn't make their mortgage payments. And the sad thing is that it doesn't stop there. How many banks have been affected, how many mortgage-backed securities that little old ladies have in their investment portfolios have been affected? And, and an even better question, who's at fault? The more-than-likely uneducated borrower, the banker who should have known the borrower couldn't afford the house, the mortgage broker who was interested in the bonus, the underwriter who should have seen the red flags in the file, the appraiser who wanted to make the bank happy? I don't know who is to blame and more than likely it's everyone's fault individually and collectively and now everyone is paying the price.

Right now, even if you knew you had a problem and you needed to do something to fix it, you couldn't sell your house because the market is so depressed. Holly said that where she lives was just a rice field not even 10 years ago. In that short time, shopping centers have popped up, commercial buildings, housing additions, all with open space available and for sale signs posted everywhere. What a difficult time to be in the real estate market. Unless that is if you're a buyer with a lot of cash and time enough to wait out the downturn.

So, although I'm still having great fun hanging out with family and friends, this portion of the trip has been a reality check. Anyone who thinks that things are all peachy, well, you're just flat wrong. If you live in Pryor, Oklahoma, I can see where you'd think things are wonderful, what with Gatorade and Google moving to town but sometimes you have to look beyond your front porch because we all live in the same big world. And what is happening in Sacramento or Chicago or New York City is bound to affect you.