Foreclosing Lives, One Tenant at a Time

My parents rented a house for the first 16 years of their marriage, and they never agreed on what this meant for their lives.

Mom always thanked God for the roof over our heads. Dad said the only difference between our house and a prison was that we kept the keys.

When they bought their first and only house, there was a subtle but immutable change in their daily reprimands about how to navigate the place. When we rented, the emphasis was on taking care of things that didn't belong to us: "This is not our house," they would yell over and over.

The week after we moved into our own home, the change in emphasis said it all: "This is our house ." We still had to take good care of it, just for different reasons.

Years later, I was a paying tenant with conscientious landlords — an elderly Hungarian couple named Kathy and John. We cut deals based on mutual gratitude: They wanted a long-term tenant who cared about their house, and I wanted landlords who understood why I needed to make their house a home.

I painted every room, tore up old carpeting and weeded the flower beds. In return, they never raised my rent for the nine years I lived there. They read everything I wrote, dined at my table at Thanksgiving and always called my Caitlin their blessed Katalina. They're gone now, and I wish I had told them more often how grateful I was that they invested in me as a human being, rather than treating me as only an investment.

The recent crisis in housing foreclosures, born of greed and ignorance, has taken another ugly turn, which is why I've been thinking a lot lately about my own family's history as tenants. The news has been bad for a while now about the housing foreclosures in the subprime lending shake-up. But now so many innocent renters are losing their homes because lenders have foreclosed on their landlords.

Every month, the number of tenant evictions rises. Single homes, duplexes and entire apartment buildings are spitting out families who had no idea their landlords were not paying the mortgage.

Many of these tenants are low-income. Others, though, are a lot like my parents — or me, when I was a single mom. Too often, their only warning that life is about to explode is an eviction notice from the bank.

Stories about rental properties are so often about beleaguered landlords and ungrateful tenants. The scenario runs like this: Landlords try their best to provide affordable housing, and thankless tenants trash the place. Occasionally a slum landlord makes a headline, but even then, the tenants are often depicted as deserving what they get.

Many tenants, though, are like my parents and like many of my friends and colleagues. They're like our four grown kids, too, who are fully entrenched in their daily lives as tenants.

One daughter shares a tiny apartment in Manhattan, blazing a trail in the magazine world. Another daughter lives with her husband in an apartment in Brooklyn, both working for social justice. In Ohio, our son and his wife are both academics. They also are expecting our first grandchild, and now testing for lead has them negotiating and me practicing nonintervention.

Our youngest, living with two other college students, rents near campus from a hovering father-son team. Mike Sr. recently tossed his keys on the corner of her dining room table, which immediately collapsed. It was a generous hand-me-down from family friends who forgot where they stored the bolts. My daughter assured Mike Sr. they just wanted the table for decoration. He assured her they were certifiably nuts and replaced the bolts. Such acts of kindness are not in the rental contract, yet he comes through, time and again.

Nice landlord, grateful tenants: No story there.

No story ever, we hope. But how do we know?

It used to be a reasonable assumption, and a crucial one, that tenants rent from solvent landlords. Like so many tenants across the country, our kids have a lot to lose if a stranger suddenly pounds a fist on the door because somebody else couldn't pay the bill.

This foreclosure crisis creeps closer and closer every day.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.