There was a photo accompanying a story on page 5B of the May 15 News & Observer showing a woman, Rose Inman of Seattle, packing her belongings in anticipation of foreclosure on her home.
The photo clearly is meant to elicit sympathy from the reader for a poor victim being thrown out of her home by a heartless mortgage company. But as one of my old editors would say, “This story has more holes in it than the Augusta National.”
It’s not until you look a little further into it that you find it’s hard to shed any tears for the woman in the photograph, who is quoted at the bottom of the story.
In the photo caption you find that her monthly mortgage payments are $3,100. That kind of payment, at current rates, comes with a mortgage pushing $500,000, about $470,000, to be precise. We also learn that this woman has been laid off of two jobs, hardly the kind of stability one would expect to find of a person to elects to encumber herself with a $470,000 mortgage.
I’m assuming she’s single, with one income, since we are not told of a spouse with a second income to help make house payments in the event of the layoff of one spouse. Many two-earner families manage to continue mortgage payments after one loses a job, with some belt-tightening, of course. Relying on one non-professional income to support a $3,100 monthly mortgage is a gamble, at best.
But, you might say, Seattle is an expensive place to live, so maybe clerical workers there have no choice but to cough up more than 3K a month for a livable home. Well, let’s see.
Searching Seattle-area real estate, one finds that $470,000 will buy you more or less home in the Seattle area, depending heavily on where you purchase. Her home, according to this story, is on a lot “overlooking Seattle’s Puget Sound.” One of the basic laws of real estate is that water-view property is always more expensive, meaning she probably paid more for her house than she probably needed to.
Click on that link above for Seattle real estate and you’ll find a map of the area. As you would expect, homes get less expensive the farther away you get from the city. While $470,000 might get you a one-bedroom condo downtown, it can get you a five-bedroom detached in Shoreline. A lot less than that will get you a two- or three-bedroom home.
The reporter seems not to have asked the one question most American homeowners, those who are managing to make their payments, would ask: Why did you buy such an expensive house in a premium location on your salary, especially when you probably knew you were a candidate to be laid off at the first sign of economic trouble?
That question would have destroyed her value as a victim and made her seem simply irresponsible. It would have made clear to the reader that she could have searched, as I just did, the Seattle real estate sites and found a perfectly suitable home for less than half the mortgage she is currently paying.
She and many more irresponsible homeowners like her now are in trouble, and politicians want us to pay their mortgages for them. The media never phrase it that way, though. That might upset too many people and put another government bailout in jeopardy.
Here’s how this particular reporter puts it:
Inman, 58, was laid off from a manufacturing company, and then from the City of Seattle. Since then, she’s been working as a human resources consultant, but making much less money.
Despite numerous calls, e-mails and letters, she says she’s been able to have one phone conversation with a company representative.
“It’s like this huge, concrete thick wall that you cannot get through,” she said.
Last week, Aurora joined the Obama administration’s loan modification program. The Colorado company is in line for nearly $800 million in government incentives to modify borrowers’ home loans.
That $800 million will come out of the pockets of millions of taxpayers who are managing to pay their mortgages, who decided to do with a three-bedroom house, perhaps, rather than the four-bedrooms they really needed, because that’s what they could afford to buy. This is something that needs to be reported explicitly to readers.
Journalism claims to be about “the truth.” But the truth of this story is lost in the attempt to write a story sympathetic to a mortgage bailout program.