"Michael
Hutchings bet it all when he built his 3,300-square-foot dream home on a
strip of rock-strewn desert gazing west toward the Las Vegas Strip. He
had made a fortune building custom homes as Vegas boomed higher and
higher, and for his own, he chose red Spanish tiles, wrought iron and
silky white plaster. A guesthouse? Sure. Swimming pool? Of course.
That
was 2006. You know what happened next. Today, more than eight years
after the housing crash, Mr. Hutchings, 49, owes about $800,000 on a
property that has not recovered its value from the bubble days. As
neighbors lost their homes to foreclosure,
he started to hear gunshots and see stray dogs roaming the streets here
around Sunrise Mountain. A drug dealer moved in down the block.
Over
the protests of his wife, Terrisa, Mr. Hutchings now stashes an unloaded
shotgun in the bedroom closet and a handgun in the kitchen cabinets,
tucked beside the glassware.
He
could walk away from his mortgage and lose the $580,000 he has paid, or
he can keep pouring his savings into the same hole. It is a mess with
no good choices, he said, just like the presidential election. He will
vote Republican, but Clinton or Trump — either way, it feels like a
losing wager, he said.
“The
whole system’s kind of broke,” he said. “We’re trying to reinvent
ourselves, trying to run businesses, trying to pretend like it’s 2003
again. And it’s not.”...
Las
Vegas is a glittering promise built on a simple truth: The house always
wins. But years after rotten loans and plunging home values made Las
Vegas the center of the housing crisis, thousands of people have yet to
recover from the cataclysm that tipped the United States economy into a
recession.
Even
with new resorts springing up on the Strip, home values recovering and
record numbers of visitors pouring back to this American playground,
thousands of people in golf-course mansions, gated condominiums and
stucco starter homes are still stuck in 2008, battling with their banks,
owing more than their homes are worth, trying to negotiate a sale to
avoid foreclosure. To visit this underwater America is to take a tour of
too-easy money, bad choices and worse luck, and of the way the economic
toll of the Great Recession still haunts much of America.
They
blame themselves, but their scorn for banks and bailouts runs as wide
and hot as the desert. The crash tarnished their faith in that core
American belief that buying a house was a foolproof path to security and
prosperity.
 |
| Vegas house in foreclosure |
Housing
sales and prices are rebounding across Las Vegas, but the market was in
such a deep pit that families who bought at the peak or borrowed
against their homes say they may never see any return on their $240,000
starter home. Some who walked away are bouncing from rental to rental,
negotiating bankruptcies and trying to fix their credit. And they say
the tepid job market — Nevada’s unemployment rate is 6.4 percent, up
slightly in the most recent government survey— is an added weight.
To them, the economic recovery was a fickle storm that brought rain to some parched farms while skipping theirs. The frenzied market for million-dollar studio apartments in Manhattan and seven-figure bungalows in Los Angeles might as well be another planet.
A ‘Last Stand’
A
Marine veteran, Mr. Hutchings is now a block captain for the
neighborhood association near Sunrise Mountain, 10 miles east of the
Strip. Like many residents of the scattered American cities where violent crime
is rising, he got so concerned that he installed iron gates and 12
security cameras to watch over his 1-year-old son, Maxim, and 3-year-old
daughter, Natalia, as they play. When he takes them to the park, he goes armed.....
One in four homeowners in the Las Vegas area owes more to the bank than his or her home is worth, according to RealtyTrac.
That is the third-highest rate in the nation, behind Cleveland and
Akron, Ohio. And though prices are recovering, they are still below the
frenzy of 2005, when people lined up for open houses and bought homes
for nothing down.
Mr.
Hutchings skimmed through the neighborhood’s hodgepodge of
upper-middle-class wealth and suburban decay....One minute, he seemed ready to give
up. The next, he was determined to keep up the fight with his bank.
“This is my last stand,” he said. “I’m like that old farmer who won’t get off his property.”
As
he drove, he raved about “Plutocrats,” a book by Chrystia Freeland that
critiques the rise of the superrich. He also reflected on the two times
he had met Mr. Trump, at a Florida nightclub and a real estate event.
“Just a super cool guy,” he said. “Nothing like he is on TV.”...
Selling to Avoid Foreclosure...
Selling to Avoid Foreclosure...
Drive north to a quiet suburban street across from an elementary-school parking lot where Mark and Anna Lissor taught their son, and now their grandson, to ride a bike. The Lissors are hitting retirement age, but they owe about $500,000 on an overdue home-equity loan they used to remodel their house. They are hoping to negotiate a short sale for less than the value of their loan. It would spare them foreclosure, at least.
“I
was so stupid,” Ms. Lissor said. “How could I be so naïve? I just
didn’t realize what was going to happen. Our balance was going up every
month, every month. And then everything plummeted. And we were in the
hole.”
The
Lissors are Republicans: He wears a “One Nation Under God” T-shirt, and
their car has a National Rifle Association sticker. Still, Ms. Lissor
gives President Obama credit for creating programs that sought to keep
people in their homes. But she said the bailouts had ended up favoring
banks over typical homeowners. She sees Mrs. Clinton as a liar and a cog
in a rigged system.
As
Shawn, their grandson, tumbled across the living room couch in a
Captain America muscle outfit, Mr. Lissor walked into his study and
pulled up the real estate listings for the neighborhood. A galaxy of
blue dots filled the computer screen, each representing a house at some
stage of the foreclosure process....
‘They Brush Us Off’
Head
to the northern fringe of town, where waves of new homes run abruptly
into an eternity of desert. The Jansons live here, in a peach-colored
house they bought for about $290,000 at the height of the bubble. It was
their dream home, with enough space for their growing and grown
children and grandchildren, for the Christmases when they set up two
trees and cooked for 20 relatives. They are trying desperately to hold
on to it.
They
are all Democrats, and staunch Clinton supporters....Last
Christmas, her husband, Kevin Janson, 56, lost his $20-an-hour job as a
security guard at MGM Grand and took a replacement gig at a downtown
casino for $12 an hour. Ms. Janson was getting fewer and fewer hours at
the jewelry counter at Kohl’s. Then, in June, she was hospitalized with a
severe potassium deficiency, and said she had lost her job the day she
returned to work.
The
family started to strain to make $2,000 monthly payments on a loan
that, even at the best of times, “was a little bit beyond our means,”
Mr. Janson said. As the house’s value sank, they owed more than it might
ever be worth. They spent $3,500 and countless hours to modify the loan
and reduce the payments to a more manageable $1,500 a month. They have
Mr. Janson’s paycheck and his pension as a retired member of the Air
Force.
“We can probably do it, but just barely,” Mr. Janson said.
Many
of their friends and neighbors sold at a loss or walked away from their
homes, but the Jansons decided to stay. When he drives home from work
every day at midnight, he skims past signs for sparkling new houses —
Harmony Homes! The Preserve! — but the house is all the family has.
“What we have is what we’re sitting in,” Mr. Janson said."...
The above article is part of the NY Times "Anxious in America" series "Articles in this series will explore the national mood in this election year."
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