For the past few years, the Inland Empire in Riverside County has been one of the fastest growing counties in the state - home to a major housing boom. But now the Inland Empire is pretty much the poster child for the foreclosure crisis. In the newer developments, house after house sits vacant - either up for auction, for sale by a bank or going for what’s called a "short sale" which is when the owner owes more than the house is worth.
SoCal Connected tracked down some surreal sights associated with the crisis - a company that specializes in removing whatever people leave behind in their foreclosed homes. The process is called a "trashout" - a term the company came up with because it perfectly describes what happens. Everything that’s left is dumped in a trailer and taken to the landfill. Then there’s the guy who started a business to spray-paint dead lawns. That’s right. He paints brown lawns green. We also tag along with a couple of code enforcement officers who are spending more and more of their time having to drain slimy, abandoned pools.
LISA LING: You could say that these guys are a home's most unwelcome group of guests because they're here to grab, throw, bag, haul, and generally destroy everything left behind by the owner of this foreclosed home.
The mission is to fill this dumpster as quickly as possible so it can be taken to the landfill. That's right: the landfill. Nearly everything left in this house is going to the dump.
Why would people leave a big TV like that?
JOHN PLOCHER, Western Security Realty Preservation: Well, I think that they didn't have the money to get a moving van and so they took what they could, threw it in their car, and they're off. We don't even know where they would go, but maybe to relatives, to a hotel.
LISA LING: John Plocher owns a business that contracts with banks and mortgage companies to do this dismantling, which he calls a trash-out. The word he says he came up with because it so perfectly describes how homes are emptied.
Is this house typical of a lot of the ones that you trash-out?
JOHN PLOCHER: Yes, newer home, newer neighborhoods, over the last five or six years, those are the people that participated in these subprime loans. And they're the ones that are really taking the beating.
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LISA LING: A few years ago, Plocher had three employees. Today, he has 73, trashing an average of 15 foreclosed homes a day.
So it must be a little bit of a bittersweet kind of experience, because on the one hand, your business booming, but you're from here, and you're seeing all these people's lives destroyed, essentially.
JOHN PLOCHER: And friends, too. We've got people actually in our company that are losing their homes. I've got many, many friends that have lost their homes. This is a disaster on a grand scale. This is not something that we're excited about doing.
LISA LING: That sense of sadness isn't lost on the trash-out crew.
EMPLOYEE: I wonder what I would do in their situation. I wonder how I would feel, what I would leave behind, what I would tell my kids before I leave.
I mean, I have pick up their children's toys. I mean, I pick up dolls and I wonder, I wonder if this was a little girl's best friend. I wonder what this was to somebody else. And now it's going in the dumpster.
JOHN PLOCHER: Everything that's left behind is left behind because they want to leave it here. There's no coercion. They're not being forced out of the house immediately. They have plenty of time to take it out. So it's their decision, not the banks, not ours.
- What Really Happens in a Foreclosure?
