An elderly woman, 88 years old, packed her lifetime worth of belongings in her Florida home yesterday. She had until this morning, Thursday, to be out by seven a.m. Annie Taylor shares the house with her son, Dennis, who fell behind on his mortgage and insurance payments. Dennis called his mortgage company. The man on the other end of the conversation sounded somewhat strange. “Where are you?” Dennis asked. The answer was that the young man was in New Delhi. Dennis told him, “You don’t even know the housing market in my neighborhood at all!”

Dennis tried to make up the payments but it was just too late.

On Tuesday of this week, a judge signed a Writ of Possession ordering the mother and son to get out. The order gave them less than 48 hours.

They understand why they’re being made to leave. It doesn’t make sense why it came on such short notice. “You can’t move this out in one day,” says Dennis. “You can barely get your toothbrush.” He’d called his attorney to see if he would talk to the mortgage company and ask if they could get even just a week longer, hopefully a month so that they could find somewhere else to live. The attorney called back and related that the lender said no.

How an 88-year-old-woman copes with suddenly being homeless boggles the mind. Even more unbelievable is that the lender refused to give the mother and son a decent length of time to pack up decades of belongings and find a place to go.

However, this crazy housing crisis not only affects the elderly. Children are having to be rooted from their homes and their schools where they enjoyed friendships cultivated since kindergarten. Their parents are ashamed because the family has no choice but to go to a homeless shelter and they fear Children’s Services will take their children away due to having no permanent address. School districts scramble to find ways to get these children to school; with attendance going downhill comes less money from the Feds to run the school. It’s a vicious cycle.

The rooms these families have to live in are hardly more than a box. No windows, often-just mats to sleep on, barely enough room to turn around, and sharing communal bathrooms.

None of them are really complaining. They’re just in shock and scared to death.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Mortgage Crisis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.