IMHO, as long as you owe a mortgage on a house, you don’t own the house. The bank co-owns the house. You may own a small share of it, in the form of the principal you’ve put into it. But as long as you owe anything on it, you are not the sole owner.

Would you rip off everything in a structure if you’d borrowed the money from your dad to buy a house and he was forced to sell it to someone else because you couldn’t pay him back? If you wouldn’t steal from a family member, why should you steal from any lender?

While I have no sympathy with the crooked lenders who issued the flurry of bad loans that helped bring on the current recession, two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because someone else is a crook and a jerk doesn’t mean you have to be a crook and a jerk, too.

Sorry, but if you got a mortgage with zero or very little down, you have no skin in the game, and you are a tenant to the bank.

And in the case of the neighbors who “no doubt thrilled” by these stripped-clean houses lowering their property values, I would suggest not making comparisons to two years ago, since at that time the market was insanely inflated anyway.

I still stand by my premise that if I wanted to make changes to my home, I can do that. I base this on looking at some of the butt ugly colors some people in my neighborhood have chosen to paint their homes, which I believe has got to drop their property value somewhere in the lines of 150%.

Couldn’t the damages be included in a similar judgment? Not that it matters, judgments are worthless if there’s just no money to be recovered.

The people in these homes do own the home, yes, just like I own my home. If I wanted to rip out the downstairs bathroom, sell the tub, toilet, sink etc. and turn that room into a closet, I would be within my rights to do so. I don’t have to get an OK from the bank who holds my mortgage.

On the other hand, homeowners who know that foreclosure is imminent and who rip out those fixtures out of revenge … well, I think that’s misguided and wrong.

On the OTHER other hand, being in a position of having had a recent job loss in the family that severely impacted our income and therefore in the process of trying to get a modification to our loan … which was not even close to being a debt burden with our income level before … these banks are not winning friends and influencing people. I won’t go into the ridiculously obstructive tactics they’ve built into their processes here, but I can guarantee you that I’ve had some not so kind thoughts about what I would like to do to them, and where I would like to shove a piece of stripped piping.

If the banks are willing to let the homes go into foreclosure so they can reclassify the debt as toxic and let taxpayers pick up the tab, I don’t see this as being a matter of personal character ONLY for the homeowner. People are mad, and I think rightly so.

Myself, if I knew it was going to get to a point where my home was going to be foreclosed because the bank was being uncooperative, I’d probably stop making payments before I was really forced to, stick that money in a mattress and set it aside for the expenses I’m gonna have renting a place. Bad character or rational behavior, TML?

And yeah, I’m with Rick … sleeping in tents, come on. That’s a bit much. You’re way too intelligent to make a statement like that. You know the reality of what is going on with people is not just one general statement of character, it’s thousands of individual stories. I’m sure if you randomly picked a few of them to sit down and talk to, you’d have a harder time condemning.