There is a great deal of pride that comes with living within your means, making an honest living and paying your own way.
Pride walks hand in hand with responsibility, which is why there are plenty of hard-working people of modest means with well-kept homes, acting as good neighbors.
When you refuse to live within your means, apparently much of your value system falls by the wayside as well.
There's no doubt the foreclosure crisis has hit home for plenty of honest, hard-working people who simply fell on hard times. But we've also done countless stories on those who trashed their homes as the bank closed in. Some stripped the homes bare, literally taking the kitchen sink, along with much of the copper wiring.
For a while there, it looked like there was little a bank could do. After all, until the property was formally foreclosed, the "owner" (the occupant who hadn't made a mortgage payment in six months) had every right to modify his property in any way he saw fit.
So, they punched beer bottles through the drywall, spraypainted obscene messages on the walls and put glue in the doorlocks. The stove, washer and dryer and refrigerator wound up on Craigslist.
Federal prosecutors have finally given a handful of these people their comeuppance, by charging them in cases which will likely mark a precedent in the realm of private property rights.
Someone has to do something, because those who trash and dash create a ripple effect in the entire economy. Stripped homes are tougher to sell. They sit on the market longer, and when they do finally sell, they go for much less. While the dilapidated shell sits unoccupied, it creates an area of blight in a neighborhood and quickly drives down property values for those who are still trimming the shrubs and trying to protect their investment.
It's sad, because many of those who are tearing apart their homes probably should've never had the chance to live there. They were given loans they couldn't afford, for houses they couldn't maintain.
There are some who would submit sub-prime mortgage holders are victims, but I refuse to believe they are entirely without complicity. Many of them wanted a lifestyle they didn't earn and blamed everyone else when the math finally caught up with them. There is neither pride nor responsibility in that, and there is genuine shame in the mess they've left behind.
