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How Working People Are the Canaries in the Coal Mine

While it’s nice that politicians are finally talking about the “affordability crisis,” working folks are wondering: Where have you been?

In my early 20s, I worked in a courthouse. Courthouses aren’t as exciting as you might think; real trials rarely happen and mostly papers are filed, data is entered, callers are put on hold. Courtrooms are a depressing parade of people who have messed something up in some fashion or another and now are having their lives turned upside down by judges, bailiffs, attorneys, and jailers who rarely look up from their desks.

Most of the work isn’t in the courtroom but the adjacent office. This is where dozens of people, nearly all women, stamp documents, clack on keyboards, and stand on their tippy toes to retrieve files. It was the office where I met Carla, a fortysomething grandma who kept stuffed animals in her desk drawer for the children who had to wait by her desk while parents went in court.

Everyone loved Carla. She was generous, gregarious, and good at her job. She’d been a clerk for nearly 20 years, and when I met her, she had just gotten approved for a mortgage for her first house.

It was 2004 and Carla was building a home. On Mondays, she would report to us on the progress. The lot was selected. The cement pad was laid. The framing was up, the driveway poured. The plumbing, the drywall, the bathtub were in.

By the end of that summer, I drove to Carla’s single-wide trailer where she, her two sons, her mother and her grandson were all living and helped load up a U-Haul. We drove out of the dingy city, up the highway, to where her new, suburban life was waiting.

Two years later, I was helping load up another U-Haul. Unable to keep up with the high payments, Carla, her mom, her sons, and her grandchildren had been served with a foreclosure notice. We packed all day, and that evening, as I drove out of the neighborhood, I noticed waist-high grass in several yards and another foreclosure notice on the door of what was once the neighborhood’s model home.

The following Monday, Carla was quiet at her desk with the drawer full of stuffies. I overheard another clerk, when she offered Carla a hug, whisper: “I just lost mine, too.”

A year later, the nightly news started........

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