Climbing Down the Ladder

By BOB HERBERT
NYT

I asked Kim Richardson, who is 59 and lives in a modest ranch house in Rocky Mount, N.C., what she would do if a hearing next month goes against her and she loses her home to foreclosure.

After a long pause, she said, in a voice faint from worry, “I don’t know. I’ll be out on the street, I guess. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

Ms. Richardson, who lives on a pair of monthly disability checks, lies awake night after night, unable to fend off the frightening homeless scenarios that dominate her thoughts. “I never believed that anything like this could ever, ever happen to me,” she said.

If you believe Ms. Richardson’s account, and I do, she was fast-talked into a mortgage that would have been impossible to pay off with her fixed income. Foreclosure would have seemed inevitable. But Ms. Richardson and her current lawyer, Carlene McNulty of Raleigh, N.C., said the figures that would have made it obvious to Ms. Richardson that she couldn’t afford the mortgage were deliberately concealed.

While the news media have been focusing on the banks, brokerage houses and mega-millionaires being buffeted by the ill winds of the financial crisis, the millions of lower- and middle-income Americans sinking toward the protracted hell of destitution are getting very little attention.

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