The Pride of Home Pawnership

From NPR: For Some, Housing Crisis Stress Is Unbearable.

It's only natural to worry as the value of homes and investments falls. But the financial crisis is hitting some people harder than others. In California, the housing meltdown started early. Over the past three months, a record number of Californians lost their homes to foreclosure.

Scott Harden lives on a quiet street in North Pasadena, in a neighborhood that is aptly named Bungalow Heaven. But before dawn one recent morning, Harder woke up and smelled smoke coming from the home of his 53-year-old neighbor, Wanda Dunn.

Harden called 911. When emergency personnel arrived, they found Dunn's body in her rear bedroom. She'd apparently set her house afire and shot herself in the head. Dunn had been facing eviction from the only home she'd ever known.

Dunn had inherited her bungalow from her family and lost it after she stopped working because of a disability; she had also made some bad financial decisions.

Beverly Hills psychologist Kenneth Siegel says Californians are especially attached to their residential real estate.

"California represented for many of us the pinnacle of the effects of hard work," Siegel said, "of the ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps."

Owning a home, Siegel said, "represented the physical manifestation of all we have done and how hard we have worked."

But Californians' dream of a modest detached home, Siegel says, often morphed into something far grander when the economic boom of the 1990s made home loans — many of them subprime — easier to come by.

"So here, as much as anyplace else, people did overbuy, their houses were bigger than their egos," Siegel said, "and they in fact invested more of themselves and more of their savings in them."

Basically, death was better than renting after she made a "few bad financial decisions." (= pull all the equity that her parents built up out via a HELOC, and blow it all.)

As Oscar Wilde commented on the death of Little Nell, "one would have to have a heart of stone to read without laughing."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!