An entire street of boarded up, foreclosed houses
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"..Maybe a few bad memories..."
This is crazy. I'm so glad you posted this. You know, you read about foreclosures and it seems pretty daunting, but you see it, in a video like Carl's and it takes on a whole new level. There's an editorial in today's Globe about the same neighborhood.
boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion...a_foreclosure_virus_spreads/
The Globe calls it a "virus of foreclosures" looking at the video it's pretty clear why. This neighborhood is by all appearances ailing, some might even say dying. How does this visual affect the youth in that neighborhood? How do involve them in the discussion and in the effort to build the solutions? So that it doesn't seem hopeless. So that they can envision the neighborhood vibrant again. I've followed your lead and am writing about this over at my own blog (www.speakunited.org) and would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this (at either UH or my blog, doesn't matter.)
Here's a Thought...
Maybe they shouldn't give mortgages to poor people?
Absolutely! But not in the way you meant...
When the Bush Administration de-regulated mortgage regulations, every bank and mortgage company could offer really crummy deals to ignorant people (who tend to be poor)and lie about those deals.
And now we see the huge impact of that lack of regulation on neighborhoods such as that shown in the video.
The people who took on mortgages are also responsible, but until you know how many of those buildings were owned by speculators, how many were bought by victims of fraud and what the income levels of all the buyers were, it's not safe to generalize about "poor people".
Pat, I'd like to buy a Clue Please
With that bleeding heart of yours, you must have to change your shirt every hour. ;)
The subprime mortgage 'crisis' is, to me, personally offensive. Oh no, we have to bail out a class of stupid poor people, or poor stupid people, or people who thought, "Wow, I have awful credit and this company is giving me a 10% interest rate with no money down!" - that kind of fraud?
I don't think you can call rank stupidity a type of fraud. Maybe instead of buying an overpriced house in a lousy era (eg Dorchestah!) they should have used the money and gone to community college, or bought some books (or surfed the web) to read about mortages, mortgage rates, home ownership, debts, etc.
Yes MA is a great state and all that but lets not generalize and say 'people were suckered in' - any reasonable person who has low credit, and low monthly income who even ventures into homeownership really is either uninformed, stupid or both.
I still stand by my original idea that we bulldoze parts of the city where crime is the worst, and rebuild reasonable housing from there. Historical preservationists be damned.