The Foreclosure That Was Home to a Village — Our Family
I spent my Sunday trying to lift my spirit. Oprah’s Soul Sunday offered a line from Gary Zukav that stayed with me: “A partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth.” That was my morning anchor. By afternoon, I wanted to be intelligently entertained, so I turned to the Showtime series House of Lies and, yes, I watched the entire first season in a single sweep.
On the surface it’s all gloss: boardroom deals, under-the-table betrayals, the choreography of sex and swagger. Don Cheadle’s Marty slides through it all. But beneath the bravado, something familiar moved under my skin.
I once worked as a Deloitte Project Coordinator. I know the language, the tactics, the way consultants talk about being “beached” — benched, sidelined, disposable. In one episode, a school principal casually dismantles Marty’s spin because she was once a Deloitte PM. It’s funny until it isn’t. It’s funny until you recognize yourself.
And then Episode 1 goes straight to the foreclosure crisis. That wasn’t fiction for me. That was my life.
I had poured more than $100,000 into renovations over the years — sweat, savings, permanence. And then, by October 2009, the house was gone and with it all the years of deep attachment to ownership.
IndyMac, the bank at the center of my storm, declared insolvency, took its protections, and reemerged as OneWest. Bonuses and retainers kept flowing to executives and consultants, while families like mine stood outside doors we used to open. The 2013 mortgage settlement promised restitution; some banks joined. OneWest did not. Corporate profit proved stable. Due process for us did not.
Here is what I saw in my own story. Foreclosure didn’t happen to me alone. It happened to a family, my family. When one home falls, in this case, our family of siblings and extended members were left with no choice but to rebuild and reconstruct our lives from nothing.
So when House of Lies wrapped fiction around the very real wounds of the mortgage collapse, I couldn’t watch as a bystander. I was not watching a drama; I was watching a documentary in disguise. IndyMac to OneWest, bailouts to bonuses, legal teams on retainer — and families told to “sail on.”
The excesses on-screen — drugs, infidelity, slick grins — don’t matter to me now. What matters is the truth beneath: profits were insulated, greed prevailed, and communities absorbed the cost. I have yet to recover. Many have not.
Here’s my simple accounting: a key I can’t turn anymore, a door that no longer knows my hand, and a neighborhood that lost more than one address. Call it a crisis if you like. I call it what happens when the math of profit outruns the math of people.
And if there is any grace to be found, it is in telling it plain, so the next village does not have to learn it the hard way.
(If you’re curious about the episode that sparked this reflection, it’s Season 1, Episode 1 of House of Lies.)
How I remember this moment frozen in time, and oh, how I miss that beautiful house.
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