When foreclosure hits the family home

My parents bought the house on Evergreen in 1969, shortly before my brother was born. It was their second turn as homeowners in 15 years of marriage. Their first house — my first home — was in Villa Park, a western suburb of Chicago. The new house was in Elmhurst, one town over, a larger suburb popular for its outstanding public schools and easy access to downtown Chicago. Lots of professionals walked to the commuter train station every morning for the 16-mile trip to the city.

Our Elmhurst home was built in Cape Cod style: a brick square with dormer windows on the second floor where my little brother and I had bedrooms, shared a bath and played in a so-called “sewing room.” The first floor had a small entry, living and dining rooms, kitchen, master bedroom and bath, and a spare bedroom that served as my mother’s office.

The home grew to define my parents. In it, they would raise their two children and become part of the community, joining the Catholic Church, PTA, Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. My mother lived there almost 20 years, until her death in 1988; my father moved on not long after. He never owned another house.

As much as Mom and Dad liked their home, they weren’t the kind to spend weekends on home improvement — no bathroom upgrades, no granite in the kitchen. They didn’t have the means, and family time always took precedence. Their one significant project was a basement remodel. My father got motivated to enhance our unfinished and unloved basement and enrolled in a community college course to gain the necessary skills. In his typical fashion, Dad charmed the instructor into holding the class sessions in our basement instead of at the college, turning the course into a hands-on exercise in improving our home life.

I don’t know the original purchase price, but our house couldn’t have cost my parents much more than $20,000. In early 2009 the estimated median value in the neighborhood was $375,000, according to Cyberhomes, down from a peak of $468,000 in August 2007, but still $100,000 higher than surrounding DuPage County.

Its true value is impossible to measure. For me and my brother, Jeff, the house on Evergreen is a memory-filled treasure chest. In the market’s view, a shell is a more apt metaphor, because today our childhood home is abandoned and in foreclosure.

Post-immigration ethnic migration

The decision to live in the west suburbs reflected post-immigrant migration patterns in Chicagoland. My grandparents’ generation had settled in ethnic enclaves in the city, or one suburb beyond the city, but my parents’ generation pushed farther out to places like Elmhurst. The next generation expanded to the west and north, raising families in places like Palatine that seemed remote during my childhood. (The former cornfields known as Gurnee are the exurbs today. Gurnee was Wisconsin when I was a kid.)

When my parents arrived in 1969, Elmhurst was a community of 50,000 residents who were solidly white and middle-class. And when I was growing up, DuPage County was overwhelmingly Republican. Mom and Dad were white and Catholic, but their politics were liberal, owing to their Italian and Polish immigrant roots. For them, Elmhurst was a lovely community to start their family, and buying a house signaled that this couple, a secretary and a Navy veteran, had arrived in the middle class.

Homes in the center of Elmhurst were the nicest. Some dated to the 1800s (the town was founded in 1834); all were built in classic Midwestern style, with an abundance of brick and expansive porches. At the north end of town, where we settled, the houses and lawns were more modest, developed following World War II, back when every house on a block didn’t have to look exactly alike.

The neighborhood enticed other families like mine to move in, so my brother I had dozens of playmates. Summertime brought epic games of “kick the can” with kids flowing from yard to yard until the streetlights came on and told us to go home. During the school year, we walked together to Roosevelt Elementary School, cutting through yards on Fremont to shave three blocks off the often-frigid trip.

By the time I reached my teens, our well-regarded York Community High School was selected as a top public school in the country. I still remember when the U.S. Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell, came to honor us, because I was a yearbook editor and got to meet him. Education was always a big deal to Elmhurst parents. The gold star we earned rewarded their commitment to their children and the schools as much as the students’ work.

For me, York High was a leaping-off point to college at Northwestern and a career in journalism that has taken me around the country. For my brother, it was the place he’d meet the girl he’d later marry and with whom he’d have two daughters. Their home is only three miles from where we grew up.

Life today in Elmhurst

Today, some 43,000 people live in Elmhurst. Ethnicities and politics are a bit more mixed. The heart of the town is nothing if not more robust and vibrant than it was 30 years ago. The independent movie theater has expanded from one screen to several. There are new lofts and cool restaurants, while the 75-year-old York Furrier shop holds its own. Yes, there’s a Starbucks, but how could there not be?

Home prices swelled in the 1990s and early part of this decade. The town's appeal was only growing, and homeowners' cash was flowing into home improvement. Elmhurst was not unusual, of course. The era’s general prosperity saw homes being built and improved in suburbs across the United States. And as with other cities, teardowns became commonplace. Elmhurst’s homes were ripped out like weeds to make way for boastful suburban mansions. Little Houses on the Prairie fell victim to imposing brick structures that gobbled up yards. Each of my visits home necessitated a gawker’s drive down Evergreen for fresh revelations of new teardowns. The sweet yellow one-story across the street? Gone. Next door, the bookend to our Cape Cod? Decimated.

Although their successors were bright and shiny, they fostered the awkward look of a grade schooler’s smile, in which some baby teeth are missing and others have been displaced by supersize adult teeth. What a weird effect it had on the character of my childhood neighborhood. My pride in my hometown and pleasure for the happy-looking families dwelling in the new houses was tempered by nostalgia for the perfectly small, simple homes that vanished. By the time I visited last fall, half of the homes I remember from my street were gone.

Foreclosure at the door

My father sold the house around 1990, when living there without my mother was a burden. He was in his early 60s, an age to think about downsizing and retirement. I recall the selling price being approximately $120,000 — six times his initial investment. The profit represented the bulk of his retirement savings.

I never learned anything about the new owners. During my subsequent Evergreen reconnaissance missions, the exterior of my old home seemed unchanged. The mailbox was the same black metal; the front door that I won at a hardware store grand opening (the door prize!) was still there. The London plane tree my family planted in the parkway, however, grew larger and lusher.

According to Cyberhomes, my family’s house sold in 1998 for $205,000 and again in 2006 for $410,000. The latest owners must have had a tough go. Perhaps their subprime mortgage reset or they lost their jobs or became ill. Or maybe the house was purchased speculatively, as a teardown, but the investor became insolvent. For whatever reason, the house reverted to bank ownership. My brother called me one day last summer, his words tumbling out with emotion, to report that he’d seen our house listed in an auction announcement in the Elmhurst Press. He said there was a $350,000 judgment against the owners.

Jeff developed a minor obsession with the foreclosure on Evergreen. He wanted to attend the auction, thinking perhaps he could buy the house as an investment. So, he went to see it and, with much sadness, discovered that the home had been abandoned, and worse, abused. He walked through the yard, thick with weeds, to take pictures. Through the windows he saw that the ceilings had been cut out and wallpaper had been shredded. Junk — even an old Crock Pot he swears belonged to our family — littered the floors. I wished he hadn’t shared his photos, because they forced me to see how my family home was mistreated and had suffered. The images of its skeleton poisoned my youthful memories.

My brother fretted about whether it was feasible for him to buy the house and whether the necessary renovations would swamp him. He grew angry about what the foreclosure meant to the memory of our hard-working parents and our family. We loved that house; it represented my parents’ achievements together, their success as responsible adults and their financial future. Seeing it vulnerable and victimized felt like a desecration of their life, not just four walls.

As of early 2009, the house’s fate was unresolved. As far as we can tell, it did not sell at auction in July. There is no for-sale sign in the front yard, but it is listed online as a foreclosure for sale for about $360,000. Jeff and I are convinced that whoever does buy our family home will tear it down rather than fix it up. And in a way, we’re ready to bury the house rather than see it linger, terminally ill.

I imagine that the house on Evergreen’s last owner is far more distressed by this turn of events than we are, yet our sadness at seeing the place we loved empty, damaged and forlorn is real, too. We’ve lost our parents and now we’re losing something else that is stitched into our very being. We are bereft again.