This NYT article explores a unique manifestation of how houses left over from the "foreclosure crisis" are being used. In Merced, CA, the University of CA has run out of student housing (a common occurrence at my alma mater, another large state school) and has reached an agreement with the abandoned house owners (banks, generally) to allow students to live there, paying rent instead of a mortgage. Although they're in subdivisions, the homes are luxurious, and the university sends busses to cart them back and forth from campus.
While I can't help but feel some envy for these students (I've lived in my fair share of funky, run-down college-town rentals), I'm also delighted at the unique symbiotic partnership that's come out of such a bad situation. Best of all, it seems perfectly legal and, for a time, sustainable.
In Florida, housing scams are nothing new (read The Orchid Thief for a thrilling tale of lies, deceit, and inhuman beauty). They're a time-honored tradition in that state. Unsurprisingly, the foreclosure crisis hit Florida hard and left many empty homes and subdivisions, and a wealth of bankers and individuals with expensive, unused real estate on their hands. Also, there are a lot of homeless people in Florida (it's warm most of the year). Could a symbiotic relationship be created to solve both of these groups' problems?Take Back the Land, an organization based in Miami, FL decided to move these homeless people into unoccupied homes, guerilla-style. Actually, sometimes the banks even cooperated. Tenants worked out deals with neighbors to get turned utilities turned on, they mowed the grass so the owner wouldn't get a fine, and were generally decent neighbors. Take Back the Land is pushing for a variety of policies that would provide restitution to victims of mortgage fraud, socially beneficial re-use of abandoned homes, and a variety of other well-intentioned measures. You can read about their ideas in a news article here, and on their website here. To lend them some credibility, American Public Media covered them here.
Other parts in this blogseries will include unique ways people are living post-housing crisis, the outlook for people my age, and popular new fads.
