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Salon.com picks up on our local "housing flipper saga"
Andrew Leonard, author of Salon.com's "How the World Works" blog on globalization, wrote about the larger implications of the rise and fall of David Crisp in a post on Wednesday titled " Fake it until you make it: A housing flipper saga."
He gives a quick rehash of the sordid details we locals are already too familiar with, but concludes by pondering the underlying lessons of Crisp's case: "But what does it all mean? How many other David Crisps ran wild in the great housing boom of the early 21st century? How many of the collateralized debt obligations made out of repackaged subprime mortgage securities were built from loans made to similar scammers? Certainly, there are details to Crisp's story that can safely be dismissed as "extreme." But as he told the Bakersfield Californian in 2006, as a real estate agent just starting out he bought a Corvette he couldn't afford and hired an assistant he didn't need because his strategy was to fake it until he made it. And there's something emblematically American about that credo, which holds just as true for hedge funds and investment banks as it does for Bakersfield real estate agents. We love the former waiter who transforms himself, à la Horatio Alger, into a mogul. But we also love stomping all over him when he screws up. "Obviously, David Crisp's family should be at the top of the list of people who should not be bailed out by the homeowner rescue plan to be announced by President Bush on Thursday. But what makes the whole housing saga of such enduring fascination is that the mess partially caused by Crisp and a million other small-time flippers got big enough to threaten the health of the entire economy. You could argue that every single would-be homeowner who misstated their income or took on a loan that they knew they couldn't pay or simply mistakenly believed that they would be able to refinance before the bill arrived should be left to twist slowly in the wind. But if the consequences of doing that grease the overall economy's slide into recession, who ends up really paying the price? Them, or all of us?"Fake it until you make it, it's the American way. Whether you're David Crisp, or Citigroup. And when you stumble, somebody will be there to lend a hand, because as Benjamin Franklin once noted, if we don't all hang together, we will most assuredly all hang separately."
--Jason Sperber 2 comments from 2 users
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posted by
CurtDalton
on Dec 10, 2007 at 07:52 AM
Owning a home has forever been known as "The American Dream."... With Crisp & Cole as the brokers, it's more like "Nightmare On Elm Street" While the individuals involved in this serious incident need to share the blame for the circumstances they now find themselves in (and the resulting punishment), what we should be condemning is the system that allowed this debacle in the first place!
Nah, It'll never happen!
posted by
bakersfieldrealestate
on Jan 25, 2008 at 07:28 PM
Jason, This was a pretty well written account, and for someone from out of town, it was relatively free of distortions. I will read more of Andrew Leonard's stuff on Salon in the future. How The World Works looks like an interesting column. When I read it on Salon the only problem was that the links to the Bakersfield.com articles didn't work, and the Sacramento Bee required you to register. I know there is a whole section on Crisp & Cole on the Bakerfield Californian's website. It would be nice if the links to the articles would stabalize a bit so you could put them in your blogs for people to read.
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