11
Street roots
Jan. 21, 2011
In witnessing foreclosure crisis, author forgoes judgments
BY MIKE WOLD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
can’t think of a more promising premise
for a book than the experiences Paul
Reyes narrates in “Exiles in Eden: Life
among the Ruins of Florida’s Great
Recession.” Reyes centers his memoir
around experiences in his father’s business,
which involves “trashing out” - that is,
emptying and cleaning - houses that have
been foreclosed upon when their owners
went bankrupt or otherwise defaulted on
their payments. Working with banks and
realty companies, but surrounded by the
debris of ruined lives, Reyes has a unique
perspective on the victims and perpetrators
of the recent housing crisis.
Reyes holds a degree in fiction writing
and it shows: “These were starter kits to
the (American) dream, their privacy fences
tagged with graffiti, their roofs sprouting
satellite dishes.” He is fascinated by the
detritus of lives left behind for the trash-out
crew: “Thé owner’s name was Sue, a fact
gleaned from the pile of bills and letters left
on the bedroom floor... she had inherited
money from a will... and was collecting
Social Security.... She’d scribbled epigrams
and lyrics on index cards and coupons:
‘Words express both the best & worse of
life’ ... ‘She walked across his heart like it
was Texas...’”
It wasn’t too far into the book that I
I
Exiles in Eden:
Life among the
Ruins of Florida’s
Great Recession
By Paul Reyes,
Henry Holt and
Co., Hardcover,
2010,272 pages
Reyes cares about people losing their homes
— as do his mother and father — but he never
comes to terms w ith being a cog in the great
wheel of home buying, foreclosure, trashing
out and selling to yet another fam ily that
m ay or m ay not be able to afford its
mortgage.
began thinking that this kind of attention to
detail would work as well, or better, as a
novel. Reyes is working with two Puerto
Ricans, one an evangelical Christian who
makes pronouncements on God and destiny,
the other his mostly silent, verbally abused
partner. They work in all kinds of
neighborhoods, though mostly poor ones.
Reyes asks the neighbors about the people
who had lived in the houses. He tracks
down one of them, a deacon at an African-
American church. He tries to save another
from becoming homeless. He accompanies
an organizer who moves homeless families
Stories: From the Streets
back into foreclosed properties. I longed for
a plot to tie these fascinating but disparate
elements together: I wanted Reyes himself,
the central character, to go through some
kind of change of understanding or achieve
greater maturity.
Instead, Reyes casts himself as the more-
or-less objective, unchanging observer: “I
have no excuses, other than naiveté, to
explain why thè equation between
foreclosures and homelessness wasn’t more
obvious to m e.... I never imagined that the
owners I’d met or erased from a place were
enduring anything worse than the
depressing inconvenience of living on a
mother’s couch.” But even here he can’t get
out of his head as he displays his
ambivalence about Max, the organizer: “I
sensed an intelligence in him, of course, but
still couldn’t peg him, still couldn’t tell who,
exactly, I was writing about, a revolutionary
or a knee-jerk Marxist.” As Max moves a
family back into the home they had lost,
Reyes worries that they may not deserve it:
“I wondered if moving this family back into
a home they had themselves ruined might
make things a little more complicated....
‘Were they good neighbors?’ ... ‘Were they
rowdy?’ It was a leading question, but I
thought it was important to know.”
Reyes may be too close to his subject -
perhaps worried about what his father or
his realtor mother will say if he’s too
sympathetic to radicals or poor people. A
Two nights of
poetry, stories,
satire, music and
art from the
streets.
realtor points out the obvious cases where
people who lbst their houses “knew the
market was depressed. They knew they
couldn’t sell the house, so they...
refinanced it, and then tried to do a short
sell.” Reyes cares about people losing their
homes — as do his mother and father — but
he never comes to terms with being a cog in
the great wheel of home buying,
foreclosure, trashing out and selling to yet
another family that may or may not be able
to afford its mortgage.
The narrative takes a very different
direction, leaving the current foreclosure
crisis far behind and visiting the aftermath
of a 1950s Florida land scam, one that had
taken in his parents when they were newly
married. Reyes visits the lot his parents still
own. “I stood there looking at the brush,
picking burrs off my p ants.... I couldn’t
imagine this land being worth a tenth of
what those hucksters had promised.” Yet
some of the other lots in the scam
eventually developed into a thriving town;
it’s just that his father’s lot was in the
wrong place. It’s unclear why Reyes chose
to end his book this way: Is he saying that
winning or losing on real estate is just the
luck of the draw in a capitalist market? It’s
evident that, however much he cares, he’s
not willing to judge.
Originally published in Real Change News,
Seattle, Wash.
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