Attn: Rule-Abiding Homeowners

[intjonathan]

You may find yourself unhappy that your mortgage-loving neighbors with the Escalade in their driveway and the neck-deep credit card debt are likely to receive government assistance to prevent them from being evicted due to foreclosure. You may find yourself calling this unfair. Rest assured, these feelings are rooted in a right sense of injustice, a sense that evil should not be rewarded. You may also rest assured that if this sense of yours is particularly well-tuned, you will be unhappy about a great many things in this world. You may want to examine where you learned this idea that life would be fair and you would be safe from risk if you played by the rules. I might suggest to you that playing by the rules is not, and cannot ever be, enough.

Comments

[fieria.livejournal.com]

I'm all for the eviction, actually. Then maybe King County will be forced to re-assess land values for what the property is *actually* worth instead of those craptacular rises in value that are based on not much besides the hyper-inflated housing market that's pretty much defunct now.


Mainly, though, there needs to be some rules & transparency of action in place for people who are accepting government assistance. Like having credit limits temporarily reduced to $500, requiring that the government assistance be re-paid in either money or time, etc.

[niralisse.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with the latter. There's gotta be consequences somewhere in there.

[thesnark.livejournal.com]

There are people who live too high on credit, but I think that example is really an exaggeration and an exception, rather than the rule, but it stands out like it is the rule, I suppose. Obama has stated that there are restrictions on who gets this assistance and that the rules are designed to aid " families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly" the most. Will families like the one you described benefit? Sure, but that's true of any government program.

The bailout helps "responsible" homeowners, too, even if they don't receive assistance directly. Anyone who's been even remotely close to someone that works in real estate knows that one can lose up to a quarter of their home equity if they live in a neighborhood with foreclosures.