Greetings whole Lotta 'zilla; let me address your concerns in order: with regards to your "solution" let me paraphrase Forrest: "simply is, as simply is providing". No doubt heading for the tall grass gets Vicky "out of the AV" but at what cost to her, her former neighbors, and ultimately every taxpayer (regardless of creed or color). There's no riding the line here; if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. So she Section 8's her house, then the value goes down. We're talking about that same value she just took an equity loan against, right? The decay doesn't stop at her property line; soon her boat-anchor-of-a-house is dragging the value of the whole neighborhood down. Splendid! The "solution" is in full swing! I won't cast aspersions on Vicky but let's say that Jane Doe has taken $30k out of her equity and then (for
whatever reason) her property depreciates 50 to $75k. Quote from Vicky: "my income is considered "Low" right now". For consistency let's say Jane D is in that same income bracket. Vicky herself describes the property next door as
"my Section 8 problems
". Whether by design or circumstance, folks (Even 'dem white fokes!) often default on loans when dire circumstances begin to fall in on them. You must admit the impetus to repay such a loan diminishes inline with the falling property value. If "Ol' MacDonald" were calling this square dance he'd sing "With a default here and a Section 8 there, here a crime, there a crime, everywhere a repo! Ol' MacDonald had a house, ee-eye-eee I owe!" ('dat be de' sarcasm der) So... Jane's former dreamhouse is a blown-out crackhouse; she can't rent it, won't move into it, can't possibly sell it and there's no ollie-ollie-oxen-free's being offered down at the mortgage company. She walks away from it; do you blame her? Heck no; this is America! Let's overlook the fact that she lit the fuse by Section 8'ing her home in the first place. She's already taken a big chunk out of her equity; and so it begins. Where'd Jane use the funds from her equity loan by the way? Is that our business? It very well should be, because when our interest rates go up it's to pay for Jane's (plausible and quite probable) financial irresponsibility. Maybe the Government rides in on a white horse (racist!) to bail her out? Hooo-ray! Guess what's in those saddlebags? Yours (I would hope) and my taxpayer dollars, that's what! After all the underwriters and other entities write off their losses and the municipalities keep the lawn mowed etcetera, what is the untold cost to the taxpayer? Sarcasm? Sarcasm? I should say so! I've already earned the right to utilize it. Enough of my personal tax dollars have already been spent "subsidizing stupidity" that I have a credit surplus at the sarcasm store. Pardon me if I use some to protest being ripped off.
Definition: \
Big"
ot*
ry\,
n. [
Cf.
F.
bigoterie.]1.
The state of mind of a bigot;
obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one'
s own belief and opinions,
with narrow-
minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them.
Yep! If someone wants to try and convince me that the process I've just described (which happens daily and is
not an anomaly) is the type of belief I should be open to and one that I should consider adopting, then I must confess to my own pigheadedness. Against freewill and my best judgement I already pay for other people's financial foolishness. The First Amendment is still in effect? I hope? If so, excuse me if I oppose advice which can only lead to more of my taxdollars going down someone else's drain. To that thin strip of the bigotry spectrum, I'll confess. Meanwhile back at the ranch the doctor who cut out my appendix was black; his name was Dr. Brown; he did a great job and my scar is "petite". My dentist is East Indian...
and a woman. My immediate and best neighbors - the people I notify two or three times before I go on vacation - are black (no capital B because they're Americans), Chinese, Hispanic, and a wack-ass recluse of a Viet Nam electronic intelligence Vet who
never (that I've seen), has had a single visitor in 15 years. He's white, the most questionable of all of them, and the least of my worries. He's strange but he will never cost me one single tax dollar. My Uncle married my Aunt after meeting her in Japan during the surrender ceremonies. He can be seen in many famous historical pictures of those proceedings. His family was appalled when they heard the two wanted to marry; her family wouldn't even discuss it; the military branch he was affiliated with prohibited it, officially, on paper! After the surrender it took him two years of letter writing and multiple return visits to Japan before her family finally a.) accepted him and b.) clearly saw the love between them, and c.) permitted the union. Then,
then... he had to petition Congress and write a lot of carefully worded letters to gain permission from the U.S. Government to wed a Japanese citizen. Their marriage opened the doors for many other servicemen (and servicewomen?) in the same situation. Once they were wed, within a few visits to their new home in the USA all of
his family knew he'd added a jewel to the family tree. Hopefully 'zilla you realize this makes all my cousins from that family... half-Japanese. I dated two black girls and an East Indian girl named Sunita (not concurrently), when I was in college. I am mentor to a black friend's college student son, whom I diligently ushered into a top percentile grade when he did his thesus on computer-related (mainframe) topics. For some reason I want to hate Rene Zellwiger, but I can't. I have no reason to hate Halle Berry, and consequently I don't. If I were such a racist it would be no problem choosing which one of them I'd pick as my "stranded on a desert island" girl, yet they both alternate at the top of my long and ethnically inclusive list.
As for my not offering a solution, isn't that obvious? How about stick it out, honor your mortgage commitment, get involved, know your neighbors and work to better your community. Even doing those things I'll have to admit that in this area you're only treading water until property values come around again. However, even with the market as it is, my home is worth 3 times what I paid for it 15 years ago. My wife sold her home in the increasingly affluent Santa Clarita for $96k twenty years ago and that exact home only just
recently hit a value of $500k. It was only 10 years ago in a nearby supposedly affluent neighborhood when homeowners saw the market going down and were PO'd. A few of them went and bought homes on or near their current streets, got their new furniture, their new cars, lamps etcetera (because they knew they were about to torpedo their own credit), then promptly defaulted on their original mortgages. It slaughtered the average property value but what did these self-centered cuthroats care? I told my neighbors they'd see us dragging our blankets behind us down the street before they'd hear we'd defaulted on our loan. You see 'zilla, whether or not you call yourself one, identify as one, or are one, that... is the American way. Not this
new American way that has come into being by our electing defective leaders. Pull the lever and let the wheels spin - if it comes up McCain, Clinton, or Obama, it's still just a matter of which of those three lemons ends up living in
our Whitehouse - John "Neville Chamberlain" McCain, Hitlerry Clinton, or Obama, the smooth-talking global bumbler.
Elote-'zilla, if you were to re-examine my first post (please remove your lentos curos first), you'd see that I juxtapose Nazi lowriders with "black people". I don't know where you're from (a corn crib?) but a few years ago in a Walmart parking lot, a black man was beaten to death with a hammer by the Nazi lowriders whom (the last time I checked) were "white people". Per capita the city councilmen and various officials I railed
against are of white origin. Fontana, Bloomington and Colton have a lot of
white gang activity, as does the San Fernando Valley. My "cholo" references? Hey! I didn't create them and wouldn't know what to call them if they hadn't created, then named themselves. You think a white person came up with the term "cholo"? What about rucas, hoodas and chavalas? One thing nice about urbandictionary.com is that the input, the sources, the content comes from real people whether they're in Orange County or tha' hood. Both can comment and it's for the rest of us to filter some truth out of it. If you don't like the term "cholo" why don't you go argue your (moot) point over at urbandictionary.com? Even those contributors writing the definitions there didn't coin those phrases. I think the descriptions are fairly (root word: fair) accurate. Before you start squawking otherwise, go into the bathroom mirror and tell yourself it isn't so.
Urban Dictionary: cholo
My parents were lower-middle class and I don't think we ever ultimately owned any of the homes we made payments on when I was growing up. I own the paper on my home, I own my (recent) automobiles outright, I carry no credit-card debt. So why shouldn't I (and wouldn't I) be perturbed if the latest iterations of "Boxer", "Sad Boy" and "Payaso" started hanging around in front of a newly Section 8'd house on my street, just because their parents (or Aunt and Uncle) had to move somewhere remote to follow a court mandated agreement to relocate so that "Lalo" wouldn't have to go to jail? My mother never gave me an inch if she found out (or felt in her heart) that I'd done something bad; the woman had 2nd
and 3rd sight when it came to catching me guilty. Conversely, on the news I've gotta watch "Mama" over and over again screaming "Mijo! he never did nothing!" Meanwhile her little hero, the tatted-up "mijo", is blowing the smoke out of his pistola's muzzle and grinning like a hyena into the TV cameras so his clique will see his bravado on the local news. Don't tell me it's not like that; I've lived in and around Los Angeles all my life. In the early 60's I was chased by Hispanic Catholic schoolboys whose intent was to extort my lunch money out of me under the threat of an assbeating. I'd love to tell you how I used my white-wit and my gringo sesos to send them all scraping to the pavement while they were in hot foot pursuit of me, but it's a long story, It's what they deserved, it's what they got, and I was honored to give it to them. I was the only kid in my North Hollywood gradeschool who hadn't at some time paid them off to avoid an asskicking. I was never chased again.
On the flipside I've formed great friendships with Hispanic coworkers whose immediate families spoke little or no English. I've been invited to extravagant weddings and even Quincenearas for a few daughters (all of which I attended). All I need to do is say so and I'm "een like fleeent" for a couple dozen tamales from each of two or three households during Christmas. If these people didn't like or respect me in some way, I would never be invited to such familial celebrations and treated to such perqs. What about you 'zilla? Are you "Mexicana"? If so, did you ever think about how you got that way? A flotilla (that's like a floating tortilla) of usurping Spaniards had to land in South America and kill off a lot of Incas and Aztecs, then breed with their women. How else? They didn't bring women with them on the ships! Then they worked their way up the continent killing enslaving and/or raping anything that moved until their blood was well infused in the various indigenous tribes and peoples. At that time there were no "states" in what would
become Mexico. Back then if you could hollow out a log and paddle it to Mexico, you were a Mexican. Human instincts take over, the urge to breed and Presto! "Puro Raza" (???) It's becoming rare but not so long ago I would occasionally run across a "Mexican" who would tell me of his family's pure bloodlines running back to Castillian Spaniards. Then where'd you get that nose Moishe? Somewhere back in time an Aztec, a Judeo or a Toucan climbed "on the woodpile". Maybe his mom visited Easter Island when she was pregnant with him? It's doubtful the Catholic Priests in the California missions contributed much Spanish blood to the collective gene pool. For one thing they took vows of celibacy and for another thing, little boys don't get pregnant - a convenient bit of knowledge for those "padres" who couldn't keep their robes down. You think they only found that out in the last 20 years or so? Hey 'zilla! Here's a racist and politically incorrect (and harmless) joke for you: What does the Pope use to clean up around the Vatican? "Papal towels!" Ohhhh-delay!
Okay 'zilla, you better go check your flotillas; I think they're booor-ning!
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But what can you do? If we sell what can we really buy right now? Prices here still arent as low as one would hope, the low price homes are crap a majority of the time, in poor neighborhoods with loads of remodeling needing to be done. The better areas are still to pricey for us.....
Hang a U-turn and stomp the far-right pedal!
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