A hat tip to The Wall Street Journal for spotlighting the Sun-Times’ publication of the most ignorant real estate rant in recent memory, by columnist Mary Mitchell:
Mary Mitchell
Just when I thought things couldn’t get much worse in the housing market, I got a statement from my bank telling me my monthly mortgage has shot up by $400.
Apparently the bank’s escrow department underestimated the increase in my real estate taxes and thus failed to adjust my monthly payments in the past.
I can’t begin to understand how my home is worth a lot less than it was just five years ago, according to the Cook County assessor’s office, and the bank wants me to pay more for it.
It doesn’t make sense.
There’s a boarded up house across the street — no, make that two boarded-up houses across the street, my home has lost nearly half of its value, and the bank wants me to pay $400 more a month?
No wonder so many people are walking away from their mortgages and letting the banks foreclose. Big banks and lenders are still squeezing homeowners even though these entities caused the housing meltdown in the first place.
Read all of it. It just gets crazier.
Either the Sun-Times editors took the day off or deliberately set out to embarrass their columnist by printing her words unchanged.