February 19, 2010

Man Bulldozes Home over Foreclosure

Flickr/DaveWilsonPhotography

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A bit of truly bizarre news from Foreclosureland.

Faced with foreclosure, Terry Hoskins, a struggling homeowner in Moscow, Ohio, decided to bulldoze his $350,000 home rather than let his bank, RiverHills Bank, take it from him. “When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it—no, I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I took it down,” Hoskins told TV station WLWT in Ohio. The story goes on to say:

Hoskins said the Internal Revenue Service placed liens on his carpet store and commercial property on state Route 125 after his brother, a one-time business partner, sued him.

The bank claimed his home as collateral, Hoskins said, and went after both his residential and commercial properties.

The Moscow man used a bulldozer two weeks ago to level the home he’d built, and the sprawling country home is now rubble, buried under a coating of snow.

“As far as what the bank is going to get, I plan on giving them back what was on this hill exactly (as) it was,” Hoskins said. “I brought it out of the ground and I plan on putting it back in the ground.”

(H/T Calculated Risk)

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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