Fall-out from the mortgage crisis

By Roberta Stauffer - 10/27/2008

It's hard to believe this is really happening, but I watched the news account online. Big-screen TVs. Perfectly good computers, printers. Lamps, coffee tables, wall hangings, mirrors. Closets of clothes. Toys, vacuums, pots, pans — all the things that make a house a home — all destined for the landfill.

"Trash-outs," they call them, this duty of emptying the contents of foreclosed homes into Dumpsters in short order.

Businessman John Plocher coined the term, as he watched his company grow in direct proportion to the deepening home mortgage crisis in Southern California. Banks and mortgage companies contract with his business, Western Security Realty Preservation, to get their repossessed homes ready for resale as quickly as possible.

Plocher now has 73 employees who "trash" an average of 15 homes a day.

My husband caught the story last Thursday on Channel 10's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and it's posted online at www.pbs.org. A longer version was broadcast earlier on "SoCal Connected," a KCET-Los Angeles show.

Correspondent Lisa Ling was on the scene as Plocher's crew hauled load after load of perfectly good stuff out of a nice new home in a newly built subdivision in Riverside.

These people who have lost their homes can't afford moving vans, Plocher said, so they just fill their cars up with as much as they can hold, and off they go, to who knows where. He said the banks gave them plenty of time to move their stuff. They just didn't, or couldn't.

He believes they're understandably depressed and just not thinking clearly about how they might be able to keep more of their belongings. They leave behind rotting food and virtually everything else — birth certificates, car titles, photographs. Crews even found an urn with ashes at one place. They didn't haul it to the dump.

Plocher said he's tried to donate the stuff to charity, both because it still has value and to save on landfill tipping fees, but it just never works out.

"What happens is they don't show up when they say they're going to show up," he told Ling. "They leave things because they don't think it's valuable. And then we have to come back and pick it up or we get in trouble because we did not finish the job." He encourages his crews to salvage whatever they want, but a person can use only so many tables or lamps.

Unbelievable. Landfill space is at a premium, especially in populated states like California. These same households probably dutifully separated their bottles and cans for the curbside recycling program, carried their reusable canvas bags to the grocery store, and now the entire contents of their lives is headed for the trash, rosewood coffee tables, designer pottery and all.

This is the throw-away society on steroids, and it's as wrong as the bad mortgage mess that spawned it.

You'd think it would make economic sense for the businesses in this "growth industry" to at least run two streams at these jobs — garbage and high-value reusable items they could stow away in warehouses for resale later.

I wonder whether this is mainly a California phenomenon, whether people who have lost their homes in other parts of the country have been more successful at keeping their stuff, or at getting it to others who can use it.

What a horrible feeling it must be to lose virtually everything you own (or bought on credit), to drive away from your home with only as much as you could fit in your car.

"Live within your means," we often heard growing up around here, and "read the fine print." The next houses these people own may not be as big or well-furnished, but they'll probably appreciate everything inside a whole lot more and count thriftiness as one of their newfound virtues. Let's hope so, anyway.

— Roberta (Bobbi) Stauffer is The Standard's opinion page editor. She may be reached at 496-5514 or by e-mail at roberta.stauffer@mtstandard.com.