Real estate's happy horror stories

Recent PriceChopper remarks on Curbed L.A. have run the gamut from the smug and delusional ("$899,000 is still too expensive. It will sell for $450k") to the smug and obnoxious ("L.A. has 10 million people, and a huge population of very dumb and very rich people and NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM has been dumb enough to buy that loft.") Some users look up the amount the home last sold for so they can speculate about how much the current seller stands to lose in a post-bubble market.

As charming as this chatter is, the most intense debtenfreude is saved for those foolish enough to admit their financial missteps. The pariah du jour on this front is New York Times writer Edmund Andrews, whose May 14 Sunday Magazine cover story about his personal journey into debt and mortgage default (an excerpt from his new book) sparked so much collective tsk-tsking that money now appears to be the least of his problems.

Atlantic Monthly blogger Megan McCardle, after initially lauding Andrews' article as "the bravest thing I've read for a long, long time," revised her assessment after digging into court records that suggested Andrews' troubles, which he characterized as "not all that unusual," were actually fairly aberrant (his wife had twice filed for bankruptcy).

The blogospheric response to this news has ranged from sanctimonious ("He could have lived in an inexpensive town ... and had his wife home school his kids") to dismissive ("That gurgling sound is his journalistic credibility going down the crapper, forever.").

Even without the added wrinkle of Andrews' sin of omission, I think it's fair to say that the stir his story created has less to do with the story itself than with the contagious effects of people's anxieties (and attendant judgments) about money. Whether we're talking about desperate real estate sellers, rich people who lost everything or ordinary chumps who believed the hype instead of doing the math, debtenfreude, like schadenfreude, is ultimately in the eye of the beholder.

The greater our urge to scold someone else, the more likely we fear winding up in the same predicament. And given how much fear is going around, it's hardly surprising that we're scolding our neighbors rather than doing what used to be considered the neighborly thing: saying "there but for the grace of God go I."

Not that anyone in his right mind would go near that McMansion down the street.