Putting a face on the loss of homes

By Jeffrey Lee Puckett

jpuckett@courier-journal.com

November 6, 2010

The Courier-Journal

As executive director of Women in Transition, a Louisville advocacy group for people struggling with issues such as affordable housing and health care, Khalilah Collins was in charge of finding participants for Saturday’s Truth Commission on Foreclosures and Evictions.

The idea behind the public meeting was simple: to put a face on the statistics that show increasing numbers of Louisvillians faced with foreclosure and eviction. Collins had not problem putting together a panel of experts, but after six months of trying she could find only four people willing to share their stories, and two would do so only by proxy.

“I’m not surprised at all,” Collins said. “People don’t want to talk about being poor, or not being able to pay their bills, or being put out of their house.”

There were more than 7,000 foreclosures in 2009 in the Louisville metropolitan statistical area – an 18-percent increase over 2008, according to a study compiled by the Metropolitan Housing Coalition. The same study found more than 10,000 homeless children enrolled in the Jefferson Country Public Schools system.

Collins said that the people she had talked to represented a wide demographic.

“Single people, single mothers, black, white, Latino – it’s not discriminating,” said Collins, 33, a mother of two who said she had come “awfully close a couple of times” to being evicted.

Around 30 people attended the event at First Unitarian Church, 809 S. Fourth St, including members of Women in Transition, experts and students from Spalding University studying social work.

The stories they shared had a common thread – o people being overwhelmed by events in their lives, the weak economy and a shaky housing market. One man lost his house in the wake of a divorce. A young married college graduate couldn’t find a job that paid enough to keep her from getting evicted from her apartment. An investor owned 16 houses until she got behind on her mortgage payments and lost them all.

James and Nicole Waldo moved to Louisville for work and left a house in Illinois on the market. It remains unsold, and they face a worst-case scenario of losing their investment through foreclosure and then owing their lender the difference between the mortgage amount and the auction price.

James Waldo, 30, is a teacher and Nicole, 31, is a retail manager. They rent an apartment in eastern Jefferson County. A few days ago they found out that thieves had stripped their home of copper the latest in a long, sad story that includes nine buyers backing out, sometimes because of what they described as negligence on that part of their lender.

“At this point, it seems like we could say, ‘What else could happen?’” Nicole Waldo said. “The irony is that we’re still really happy that we moved. We love it here.”

The panel at the event featured local educators, activists and members of Women in Transition, which was founded in 1998 by welfare recipients and has around 200 members. Participants included Natalie Harris, director of the Coalition of the Homeless; Cathy Hinko, director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition; and Sharon Wallace, who teaches sociology at Indiana University Southeast.