More than a million homes have been lost to foreclosure in the past two years. And according to data from Mortgage Bankers Association, banks are now in the process of foreclosing on 1.5 million more.
The impact of the mortgage crisis has been obvious in both the worldwide credit crunch and the presidential campaign, where there has been a lot of talk about the plight of overextended homeowners. But the specific personal costs of home loss have been less evident, at least to those not paying them.
Not surprisingly, the forced loss of a home — the place where many of the memories that define a life and a family are made — is deeply traumatic, according to Dr. Robert Gifford, an environmental psychologist at the University of Victoria, Canada. This is true, he said, even when the loss is due in part to a homeowner’s own financial mismanagement.