In it for the Money: Occupation
Editor’s note: This column appears regularly in The Chronicle, roughly around the third Wednesday of the month.
David Erik Nelson
Listen: Bank of America is a shitty neighbor.
To clarify, I have no beef with any specific retail banking location. The folks on Main Street (where I tread water on my mortgage each month) seem like basically good folks serving their clients in good faith. I have no gripe with them. I don’t even really have much of a gripe with Bank of America as an institution [1].
But I live next door to a house owned by Bank of America, and they are the worst neighbors I’ve ever had.
The previous owner, Mike, was a good guy; he occasionally had loud parties, but we were always invited and the food was great. Then, an hour or so after daylight savings time began in March of 2008, he was killed on the job while towing a drunk up out of a ditch along the side of an on-ramp. He had been single and had no will, so his house swiftly defaulted to the lender, Countrywide Financial (at that time the largest mortgage packager in the United States). Soon thereafter Countrywide collapsed, and the house was transferred to Bank of America [2].
More than three years later, that house is still empty. [Full Story]