Campers,
Watched great Kevin Spacey (2011) movie, ‘Margin Call’ other day and following it up with 4 hour PBS series on the 2008 crash and realized that, like Forrest Gump, I was there in the middle of the action where I was offered a free house and at the end where I fucked up getting a fat Finders Fee.
It all began with SF’s famous, ‘Class of 2000′.
A truly Reform Block of Supervisors who hit the ground running with plans to combine the Police and Sheriff’s departments under elected Sheriff Mike Hennessey and build a Leggo-style concrete block Venturi-effect Hydro Electric Plant in the 350 foot deep trench under Golden Gate Bridge.
And, of course, Ammiano had a Public Health project to insure every San Franciscan.
Tom was only one whose idea scored tho it is still under attack.
Anyway, back to the basic building block sitting next to me who caused the Sub-Prime Housing Crash.
By offering to broker a home for me for nuttin’ …
It kinda played like this:
Me: "Look man, I’m basically homeless.
Been bouncing from couch to couch and
construction site to construction site and
one house sit to another and making my
money as a laborer on a Master Carpenter
friend’s construction job.
I got no verifiable income stream !"
Other Candidate (this conversation took place during one of the D-6 debates in 2000 when all of the candidates were invited to all of the debates and there were 17 candidates and about 20 debates)
Other guy says:
"But, you’ve written about a thousand columns on politics."
Me: "Never made a dime off any of them."
Blue: "But, you just have to say on your application which I will write for you and get my handsome broker’s fee …
You just say that you expect to make a hundred thousand next year."
Me: "That’s ridiculous and they’ll know it."
Blue: "That’s the beauty of the new laws.
They won’t check !"
Me: "Splain."
Blue: "Clinton got tired or seeing black people get refused mortgages to buy new homes so he arranged with Wall Street for local bankers to stop checking applicants’ statements.
They just accept what you say and give you the home."
Me: "What happens when the first month’s mortgage comes due?"
Blue: "We write a year or two or maybe 3 years worth of cushion in the loan to pay the mortgage until the revenue for your writing catches up."
And, on Street Level that’s how sub-prime worked.
In fact, one SF supervisor who later went on to the Board of Equalization lived in a new house for 3 years w/out paying a dime !
Years later on the other end of the Crash a good friend with immense economic power and attendant connections offered me the opportunity to make a Finders Fee for locating a Bay Area RE company that would broker the sale of a slab of local housing repossessed and up for sale cause one of his groups had won the rights to sell same and pretty much charge what they wanted.
Of course I was fortunate enuff to be too dumb to make the deal of a lifetime, so to speak.
Yeah, my buddy was one of those Housing ‘angels’ who floated above the entire scene from the flashing screens on Wall Street to the half-finished housing projects where he got shovels back in the ground and others he built himself to owning big enuff pieces of the Major League baseball puzzle to get 5 World Series rings from the management side.
I swear, I think this is why I was put here.
To write about these things in terms even I can understand finally.
So, as always, I’ve made it all about me.
The Sub-Prime Housing Loans Market caused the Crash of 2008 because I did not buy that house they were counting on and increase my earnings from zero to a hundred grand in three years.
Hmmmm
Go Niners !
I’ll hook you up with a link now to a Kevin Spacey movie (‘Margin Call’) that explains it in clearer terms.
h.
h. brown's SF Bulldog 
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