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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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

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In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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