Ángel Franco/The New York Times
The three-bedroom house in Northeast Philadelphia, center, where Mr. Hall, has spent his entire life and raised his family.
Mr. Hall knew none of this. What he knew was that his life seemed to be unraveling.
Home to Four Generations
Ever since he was a teenager, he had earned a middle-class living with his hands. He had been raised by his grandfather in his three-bedroom house on Akron Street, in a predominantly Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia.
He had attended St. Martin’s, the Catholic school around the corner, married his childhood sweetheart and still remained in his grandfather’s house, sending his own children — two boys (now in their 20s) and a 12-year-old girl — to the same school.
Mr. Hall, a soft-spoken yet intense man with a silver-tinged goatee, had worked seven days a week for much of this decade, bringing home weekly pay of about $1,000 — enough to build a deck in his backyard; enough to obtain a fixed-rate mortgage and buy the house for $44,000 when his grandfather succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in the mid-1990s; enough for a motorcycle and a boat.
But three years ago, Mr. Hall committed the sort of mistake that has upended millions of households. At the recommendation of a for-profit credit counselor, he took out a new mortgage — a variable-rate loan from Countrywide Financial, which is now owned by Bank of America. He paid off some credit card debt, and he borrowed an extra $15,000 to renovate his home, expanding his mortgage balance to $63,000.
The loan began with manageable payments of about $500 a month. But Mr. Hall’s interest rate soon soared — something he says was never explained to him — lifting his payments to $950 a month.
“When I got the mortgage, I didn’t really understand it,” he said. “They told me this would improve my credit and that was it. It was just, ‘sign here,’ and ‘initial here.’ ”
No More Construction Work
He might still have managed had construction not come to a halt. By 2007, Mr. Hall’s employer was cutting work hours. In August 2008, it shut down, turning his $1,000 weekly paycheck into an $800 monthly unemployment check.
Every day, he set the alarm clock and headed to the union hall at 5 a.m., waiting and hoping for work. Every day, he went home, still jobless and discouraged, now confronting the displeasure of his wife, who worked as a nurse, and who he said never came to terms with their diminished spending power. After months of bickering, she left him last December, taking their daughter.
“She was saying, ‘How are we going to have Christmas? How are we going to go on vacation?’ ” he recalled. “She just seen it getting worse instead of better, and she got depressed.”
In January, his truck was repossessed, leaving him to walk through the winter dawn to the union hall for his daily ritual of defeat.
He watched the For Sale signs proliferating on his block, as mostly elderly neighbors found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments. He saw their belongings piled up on their front lawns as they abandoned their homes to foreclosure.
In September, the envelope finally landed with his default notice. A canvasser knocked on his door, proffering a flier urging him to call the city hot line. When he called, a housing counselor helped him assemble the paperwork for a loan modification and prepare for his conciliation conference.
When he arrived inside courtroom 676 in October, Mr. Hall carried a sheaf of wrinkled papers in a white plastic grocery bag. He occupied a solid wooden chair as an announcer called off cases for hearing. “Number 27, Wachovia Mortgage versus ... .” A girl no older than 6, with flower-shaped plastic barrettes in her hair, fidgeted as her mother applied for legal representation.
Mr. Hall was struggling to come to terms with what he assumed was the end.
“I put my whole life into this house,” he said. “After I do all this work, they want to take it from me. You’ve got to regroup and move, but where? If I can’t pay my mortgage, how am I going to pay rent? And I have a whole house full of furniture.”
When he got the news that he had a few weeks’ reprieve, relief quickly gave way to the worry that had dominated his thoughts for months.
“It’s postponing the inevitable,” he said.
“I’m a man,” he kept saying, trying to make sense of how a lifetime of working on other people’s homes had put him here, staring at the potential loss of his own home; still hoping for relief.
“I don’t want no handouts,” he said. “I just want a reasonable loan that I can afford to pay so I can get on with my life.” ( nytimes.com )
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