Chapter 5
The Great Enabler
Mike Beuscher is the grim reaper of Orange County, California. He’s a tall, pleasant-looking middle-aged fellow who makes his living clearing out homes after they have been foreclosed on, shattering the dreams of those who reached for a better life, even if they knew it couldn’t last. For Mike Beuscher, business has never been better.
On the day we spent together, Beuscher gave me a tour of ground zero for the nation’s housing bubble: Orange County, California.We saw $750,000 homes now covered in graffiti inside and out. We saw gardens, once filled with flowers, now dried up and empty. We saw cockroach infestations, garbage piled high, swimming pools half filled with strangely green water. We saw houses denuded of all their plumbing, all their wiring, and all their appliances. We saw rat-infested homes that must have slept 20 people. We saw the grimy, unsavory, sordid underbelly of the housing boom, where anyone could get a mortgage to buy virtually anything when they could afford nothing.
Mike Beuscher’s license plate reads EVICTEM. It’s nice to see a man who embraces his work. And when his black pickup pulls up in front of a house, the message is clear: It’s time to go.
The homes that Mike Beuscher is sent to empty out and ready for sale are the homes in which people have stopped paying back their mortgages. Once homeowners miss three monthly payments they are considered in default on their mortgage. Foreclosure used to come soon after. These days, ...
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