It's the, stupid, economy

There's a human element.

First, there were the foreclosure and for sale signs up and down my block, but since we are misanthropic and anti-social, and my landlords are not planning on selling this house, it didn't affect us much. After a while, most of the foreclosure and for sale signs were replaced with rental signs. And gradually, those disappeared. There are still a few in the neighborhood, but most of the empty homes converted smoothly into rental properties.

Second, there was my cat. He was obviously domesticated, and he was obviously out of doors, and he was obviously starving to death. We speculated he came from one of those foreclosed homes, was left behind when the humans went. I took him in, fed him, and his problems ended.

Third, there are the unrentable houses.

I wouldn't know about them, except that circumstances transpired to make this a good time to buy my first house. It's a buyer's market, after all. I'm not wealthy, though. I can afford a bargain, and a bargain is what I'm looking for.

The houses we've been looking at are all in need of work. Lots of work. These are houses that you cannot get a bank loan for, because no bank would loan you money to buy these kinds of problems. Sometimes the trouble is that the foreclosure happened in the middle of a flip. The investor gets mad about losing his money and sabotages the house, steals the appliances and fixtures, everything that's not nailed down. We've looked at houses with no HVAC, no toilets, no faucets. We've been warned to watch out for concrete poured down the drain.

Sometimes the foreclosure happens to someone who's lived there a long time. These houses have holes in the walls. "Angry movers," my real estate agent called it. There is trash on the property, and little slivers of other people's lives strewn here and there: spare change, empty boxes.

The saddest thing we've seen yet was the graffiti room. It was a little room in a little house. I wouldn't have bought it under any circumstances, because it was cramped, and the yard didn't suit my needs. But it was someone's house. Some little girl remembered that house as the only house, that room as the only room.

Her parents must have told her she could do as she liked, it didn't matter anymore, and she covered her room, walls and ceiling, with pastel-marker messages: "Goodbye House!" and "Memories are Forever" along with names, initials, illegible in-jokes and a few mildly rude words ("Boobs!") She loved that house and that room. She didn't understand what happened, why things had to change. She just knew they had. In some ways, kids are better at letting go than adults, in other ways, they hold on longer.

We've declined to move on the other kind of foreclosed house: the kind that still has tenants. I'm not sure how it's even possible, to go into someone's home and evict them. Sorry, you're behind on the mortgage, you lose your investment, you lose your home. But this is happening. In some places, the market is rebounding, but Tucson, Arizona is not one of them. July marked the highest number of foreclosures yet.

Someone's loss will be my profit. I'll find a home with no floors, holes in the wall, a big gap where the fridge should stand, and I'll snap it up for a song and throw my heart and my paycheck into fixing it up. No one will foreclose on me, because I will pay cash, in full. But I will remember those who came before. I will remember the human element. I will remember the little girl with the pastel markers, whose childhood home will haunt her dreams.