Nadya Suleman and the Housing Crisis
Everyone understands and is aware of the story of Nadya Suleman otherwise known as the octomom. We are aware that she was already struggling with six children and decided to have more and ended up having eight. We also know that she is seriously in denial. However, I bet you do not understand how I am equating her to the housing crisis.
Well, first, her home, the one her mother owns that she is living in free of charge is close to foreclosure. She is in foreclosure because she had more children than she could afford, and was probably too busy buying food, clothing, and (rumored) toys to pay the housing bill. It is also clear to me that she felt entitled to live free of charge in her mothers home, and obviously has no remorse that her mom is about to lose yet another home and her father is working himself to death to give everything they have to Nadya.
This bothers me so much because also owned several homes right before the housing crisis hit. It was my bad luck that both of my well paying tenants who had been with me for several years had to move, one to a different country. It was a bigger misfortune that occurred afterwards. One home had struggling tenants who paid well enough, but the previous tenant had left damages that I could not fix immediately or stay on top of. When they decided to move, I decided that this home was not worth keeping, so we got rid of it at a serious loss. In the second house, we ended up with tenants who like Nadya had no intention of paying the rent. They were “clergy” and felt entitled to living there free of charge. One month they gave me $300 of the $900 rent and were surprised when I got upset. Other months they did not pay at all. They essentially squatted in the home knowing I was at my financial end, until we decided we could not longer keep up the mortgage on the home without rent payments and also lost our shirts on getting rid of that home too. It was either get rid of the rental homes or lose everything.
What does this have to do with Nadya Suleman? Well, there is a certain attitude of entitlement that I deserve to live in a home I cannot afford. There is lack of reality, thinking the money will come. There is the indifference to the suffering that their own actions will cause other people.
America thinks Nadya Suleman is a horrible person because she is a single woman with 14 children and no means of taking care of them. However, there have been hundreds of thousands of Nadya’s out there making ridiculous decisions that have made the housing crisis as critical as it is. Just because everyone is not walking around with 14 babies they can’t afford doesn’t mean that there aren’t different symptoms of the same disease everywhere.
