Mortgage Relief and a Generational Divide

“„

I left Southern California — and all of my immediate family, too, for that matter — behind in 2005 when my daughter was about to be born, because I found that I couldn’t justify paying $800,000 for a junked-up, 1,200 square foot cracker box. I especially couldn’t reconcile how a broker was telling me that we could afford 100 percent financing at that absurd price point, given that I was a PhD student making $17,000 per year at the time, and my wife was making the median for a science geek working in the R&D trenches. It’s not been easy raising a family in Texas, where we ended up, far away from family members that could otherwise help. But we’ve made do. We’ve found new jobs (obviously, yours truly is now running the most-read news source in the mortgage trade). We’ve managed the middle-of-the-night emergency hospital trips for our sick newborn son, with a 3-year old sister in tow, and no family nearby to help. We’ve managed to teach our kids who their grandparents and aunts and uncles are through pictures we’ve pasted to some posterboard. We’ve saved and bought the house we wanted, and we did all of it because we wanted to provide a stable home for our kids. We’ve paid what I think is a steep personal price.

“„

After what my wife and I have gone through, the mere thought — taxpayer funded or not — that less responsible homeowners in California, duped or not, might get a lifeline that helps them keep their home and their credit intact, just incenses me. Actually it does more than that. It makes me want to have Barney Frank and Chris Dodd — and any other House or Senate member that talks in broad terms about stopping the downward spiral of housing prices — explain to me personally why the price my family was forced to pay matters less than the housing prices they’re so focused on trying to prop up. I want them to explain to my kids why they’re helping the very people that helped make grandma and grandpa into a picture and a phone call. A housing price correction is exactly what’s needed to prevent other young families — families like mine — from having to make the same painful choice we were forced to make two and a half years ago. Unfortunately, that viewpoint seems to carry little currency in the current political climate. And that’s a shame for anyone under the age of 40 trying to raise a family in this country.