Foreclosure factoid or tip of the iceberg?

Foreclosure factoid or tip of the iceberg?

It's gotten to the point where I don't know what to believe about foreclosure fallout.

First it's an epidemic of green pools. Then it's foreclosure stalking the neighborhoods of ritzy suburbs. Pull back the curtain on either story and "hoax" is such an ugly word. No, there was no intent to deceive—I hope—just reporting that didn't go out of its way to make things clear. Things that made all the difference between informing and misleading.

So it was with a jaded and jaundiced eye that I read "Dog House Foreclosures: Stockton takes the Fifth" posted on Inman News a while back. "The foreclosure fallout continues...Pet abandonment has increased with the rise in foreclosures, according to a promotional message for Petfinder.com, a site that provides pet adoption services."

The headline's reference to Stockton comes from Inman's attempt to get a comment on this story from, and quite possibly get a rise out of, that beleaguered city, one that doesn't revel in its new-found notoriety as navel of the foreclosure universe. The official response from Stockton's Office of Public Information is that it's no longer researching "foreclosure-related issues for the media". In other words, dig your own dirt. Call it foreclosure fatigue or maybe just media fatigue. I can relate to both.

As a foreclosure-fallout story, abandoned pets certainly seems ripe for inclusion in the urban legend hall of fame. It's a story with the compelling emotional hook every foreclosure urban legend needs.

Yet it's a credible story. Of course, so is green-pool infested, foreclosure-riddled ritzy suburbs, at least to some people, but even the most cynical among us desperately want to believe. Especially the most cynical among us, which explains ninety percent of the nonsense on the Internet.

As far as I can tell, the only fallacy in Inman's story is that the source wasn't a Petfinder.com promotional message. Instead, it appears to be a posting, "Family pets fall victim to subprime crisis", on one of Petfinder's forums by "Piper", a prolific 39-year-old Kansas woman with a hefty 1295 posts under her belt. (You have to wonder what she does in her spare time.) If you're looking for grass-roots truth, the posting's wire-service format and the "ADVERTISEMENT" inserted after the lead-in paragraph are a bit disconcerting, but the gist of the story seems believable, as do the other foreclosure-related postings on the site. While there's no hard data to prove that rising foreclosures are leading to the increased abandonment of pets, or to an increase in the number of pets brought to shelters, I realize that no one's keeping statistics on this, and the anecdotal evidence is sufficient to convince me. Many people are on the move these days and, as often happens, their pets aren't always moving with them.

Which brings me to a much larger issue, not to slight pets and the people who love them, an issue this story only hints at, one I haven't seen addressed. Foreclosure has hit certain neighborhoods, cities and regions far harder than others, and these places are witnessing social disruption on a scale as epic as that of Grapes of Wrath.

Except that no one's telling it. The story of foreclosure fallout has largely fallen into the hands of the media's mercenaries, mechanics and moralists, not a Steinbeck in the bunch. The media excels in cranking out the glossy semi-fictional account, the sentimentalized Movie of the Week version, but apparently lacks the will and intellectual muscle—and possibly the audience—to tackle the broad and thoughtful story. This isn't an original thought, but it's one I have often.

Given the foreclosure crisis' disproportionate impact on one particular ethnic group, it won't surprise me if the Steinbeck for this latest exodus has an Hispanic surname. Perhaps, like Steinbeck, its teller will have lived with the people whose story he or she tells. It's a story that's taken enough cheap shots and quick hits. It's a story worth telling, not sentimentally but compassionately, not sensationally but with passion.