Foreclosures - Advocates just as useless

It never ceases to amaze me just how screwed up our society is. Accepting responsibility seems to be a concept that is foreign even to those who are supposedly committed to helping others, especially the vulnerable.

The Mpls. Star-Tribune has been running a series of articles under the banner “From Wall Street to Main Street,” in which they attempt to put local faces on the developing economic crisis. On 9/28, they ran another installment featuring a Hopkins couple, both vulnerable adults, who lost their townhome to foreclosure.

The article includes an impressive level of finger-pointing:
• Legal Aid blames the mortgage company.
• The mortgage company blames the “closer” and third-party investors.
• The closer blames the lender.
• The adopted family blames the birth family and an absence of “safeguards.”
• The social service agency blames the County.
• And last but not least, the social worker blames the couple (credited in the article with I.Q.s of 56) for not asking for help.

I think we have come to expect irresponsibility from realtors and mortgage companies, but I expect more from government agencies and non-profits serving this population. A photo which accompanies the article shows seven (unidentified, but presumably) service providers meeting with the couple (now that it’s too late to actually help) to bemoan the situation. One of the service providers helped arrange the original purchase, and no doubt congratulated themselves for doing so, but adamantly denies any responsibility for the foreclosure.

This couple didn’t need seven useless service providers, they needed one competent one.