[NewYorkTimes] The $26 billion foreclosure settlement deal announced this month arrived in the final throes of Hollywood’s annual awards season. It also arrived too late for my neighbor, a screenwriter and director who moved out of her two-bedroom house the week before last, after her bank foreclosed on the property.
There had been no “For Sale” sign, no telltale rental tenant, no evidence of anything untoward in our canyon neighborhood, an enclave of writers, directors and actors. I saw nothing until the night I stood on my front steps, my heart in my mouth, and heard her sobbing scream — “I’m 47 years old, and I am going bankrupt!”
Now she is gone, another “statistic,” as she put it when I went next door to say goodbye as the movers loaded the last of her belongings. Her eviction follows that of our mutual neighbors, actors on a well-known soap opera forced out of their house in a foreclosure in a driving rainstorm four days before Christmas. Their dark, vacant houses, emblazoned with the public notices taped in the windows like shameful scarlet A’s, are holes in the hidden, fraying social fabric of Hollywood, where a vast majority belong not to the 1 percent but to the 99.
Screenwriter/Director:
Actors on a well-known soap opera: