Toxic Assets: Many Foreclosed Houses Are Infested by Mold

[Donnachaidh]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/ted-rall/37317/toxic-assets-many-foreclosed-houses-are-infested-by-mold

The next time someone tells you that capitalism is efficient, remember the mold houses.

I used to be a banker. Some of my customers had trouble making their loan payments. We usually had recourse to some sort of collateral--often real estate. But my bank really didn't want to foreclose.

"We're bankers," my boss told me the first time this issue came up. "Not landlords."

Back in the 1980s most banks held this view. Bankers sat on their butts in air-conditioned offices. They didn't want to manage vacated properties, much less try to sell them. They understood banking. Banking was a straightforward business: take deposits, issue loans, collect the difference in interest as profit.

More at the link --

[Warpy]

1. Around here some of them have been scavenged for metals

meaning copper plumbing and wiring. Idiots all along the food chain, from the forclosee to the bank, failed to turn the water off and now they're going to have to be bulldozed, extensive water damage making them structurally unsound.

The waste is just staggering to me, especially when people are now starting to be crammed 3 to a room in really inadequate housing--travel trailers and small apartments--when they were adequately housed just a few years ago.

In the meantime, I looked my dad's old house up. It's only worth 31% of what I sold it for 5 years ago. It's insanely underpriced and it looks like it's been on the market recently, too. It's in Florida, a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with a pool.

What's happening to this country is sickening. There is no other word for it.