HOME SICK : THE SEQUEL

Editor’s Note:

Almost three years ago we wrote about the plight of renters who were suffering mentally and, in some cases, physically, from the stress and anxiety of being unable to buy in the Southland real estate market. Today, we report the flip side of that story: homeowners suffering “ real estate anxiety “ because they can’t sell.

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In a region awash in unsold houses, news of an upswing in the Northern California housing market is a cruel joke for Southland residents trying to sell their homes.

Even though they have slashed tens of thousands of dollars off their original asking price, they go month after month with nary a nibble. It is hard for them to know where the bottom of the market lies.

And depending on how desperate these homeowners are to sell, their reactions range from bewilderment to panic. Many others have been forced to put their lives on hold until they sell their houses.

Consider, for instance, the plight of a former McDonnell Douglas executive who, jobless for the past two years and squeezed between a drastically lowered income and an expensive mortgage, can only watch helplessly as his home continues to lose value.

His 1905 Long Beach farmhouse has been on the market for three months with just one looker in that time. The family, which requested anonymity, recently slashed $25,000 from an asking price already well below what they paid near the top of the market four years ago.

“You’re going to have to cut another $10,000 off the price every month until you get some lookers,” their broker advised them over the phone.

The wife hung up in shock. A feeling of foreboding crept over her, she said. “I wake up in the morning thinking about selling the house,” she said, “and it’s the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night.”

Before one open house she cried as she vacuumed in preparation for visitors she doubted would show up. She thought it an exercise in futility. “At least my husband can’t hear me crying,” she recalled thinking to herself.

As plummeting housing prices wipe out her family’s equity in the home and mortgage payments continue to erode their savings, she fears for her future.

“This is a god-awful situation,” she said.

Chuck Bowen, 48, of Cerritos has gone beyond desperation to a kind of weariness of the soul. The former senior vice president of a bank has been ground down by 2 1/2 years of unemployment.

“I used to want to be a bank president,” he said bitterly. “Now I can’t even be a bank teller.”

His eyes were red, perhaps with fatigue, perhaps from tears. Because of stresses in his marriage he had tried living with his 88-year-old mother but he got so despondent he contemplated suicide and moved back home. Then his wife walked out.

“We don’t have any money. We need to sell this house,” said the father of the two teen-agers. “Selling the house will cure our financial problems.”

But the four-bedroom, 1,600-square-foot home has been on the market for 18 months without an offer, even though the owners have cut $50,000 from the original price of $270,000.

As Bowen agonizes over his predicament, he blames himself for the slow sale of his house. “Looking back maybe we should have dropped the price earlier and been more aggressive,” he said. “I put so much work into this place, I wanted it back.”

Bowen’s attitude is familiar to Los Angeles family therapist Janet Taylor. Many of her stressed-out clients engage in the same “blame game,” beating up on themselves or accusing their spouse of unwise decisions: If only they had bought in a different location. Or had not purchased such a big house or made so many improvements. Or not bought a home, period. The list is endless.

The agonizing is useless and accomplishes nothing, said Taylor, who teaches family therapy at the small Los Angeles campus of Ohio-based Antioch University. When she tells her clients that these difficulties are happening to thousands of other families, “it helps to spread the pain around a little bit and that’s comforting. Then they can accept it.”

Further, she explains to them that “there are simply some things in life you can’t blame anybody for. They just happen.”

However, she continued, couples expect to face the normal challenges of adulthood like marriage, having children and watching their parents grow old and die, but few have been psychologically prepared for the economic hardships that have hit them in this recession.

Her colleague, Mynette Lee, has also seen the painful effects of the housing market on her clients. The licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist practices in Santa Monica and specializes in family and marital issues.

Daily she deals with the impact that the economic downturn and the housing slump have had on families. “Everyone is feeling very insecure,” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future.”

Lee moved here from Houston two years ago and says the downturn here has been much more stressful than the one Texas experienced several years ago.

“It’s worse out here,” she said, because the gyration in the housing market was much more violent in Los Angeles than in Houston.

The chief financial officer of a local manufacturing company rode Southern California’s housing boom up and now he is riding it down.

He was standing in the cavernous, half-empty Porter Ranch home he is desperately trying to sell. “My lifelong dream (of owning a home) is going down the tubes,” he said angrily. He asked that his name not be used.

When his home skyrocketed in value to more than $600,000 he took out a second mortgage and spent $250,000 on improvements to his 3,000-square-foot residence. They included beamed ceilings, a 40-foot pool and brick patio, French doors, an elaborate driveway and two fireplaces.

Then he lost his job.

He has gotten a new one, but he is earning a third of what he used to make and is staring at foreclosure.

“It’s tearing me up inside. It’s making me sick to my stomach,” said the 45-year-old executive. During his ordeal he has lost 15 pounds from his already slender frame. “I can’t sleep at night,” he said. “It’s about the worst thing that could have happened.”

He said the home, his first, has been for sale for more than a year and he can hold out for a few more months. But just in case his lending institution decides to foreclose on the property, he has asked his wife to look for an apartment or small house to rent. They will be able to pay no more than $1,000 a month. “We’re facing financial ruin,” he said.

Lee, the psychotherapist, said she sees not only middle-aged clients facing problems like those of the Porter Ranch executive but she also counsels elderly homeowners who have financial worries.

“They thought they had all this equity in their homes for their retirement but now that’s zapped,” she said. “They’re financially insecure. They thought they were set.”

But for Howard Dahlquist, 76, and his wife, Janet, 80, it’s not so much money worries as it is a matter of putting their lives on hold while they try to sell their house.

During the boom times they wanted to subdivide an acre in Northridge that had been in Janet’s family for decades. They were going to build four homes but after they completed two, the market began to go sour and they built no additional ones.

They sold one home in August but have yet to unload the second one despite hefty price reductions down to $350,000. Reluctantly, they have decided to put their own smaller Northridge house, which they feel is more salable, on the market and move into the new 2,700-square-foot house.

They seem overwhelmed by the space as they pad around the plushly carpeted four-bedroom home with the latest kitchen appliances and three custom-tiled bathrooms.

“At this stage in life our intentions were to downgrade our holdings, rather than upgrade,” said Howard Dahlquist, who, before he retired more than a decade ago, was a carpenter for more than 30 years in the Los Angeles area.

“It’s all bewildering,” he said.

Janet said they wanted to travel the few years they have left but with the house hanging over their heads they feel they cannot leave. Almost a prisoner of her home, she added gently, “We don’t have that many years to contemplate. That’s one of the problems we have.”

“We have a nice motor home that’s been sitting in the back yard for a year and a half,” Howard interjected, “and it hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Neither has Claire Gordon. The Brentwood resident had hoped to move to the San Francisco Bay area to be closer to her grown children but she can’t sell her house.

“I understand the strategy of pricing,” the former real estate broker said confidently. She got the opinion of four different agents, averaged them and figured where the house was going to sell. And nothing happened.

“Now I feel discombobulated,” said Gordon. “If every other house like mine is asking $1.1 million, $1.2 million, and I’m asking under a million, which I am, one, two, three gone. Right? Wrong!

“They’re asking $1.7 million next door. And I’m under a million. It’s the bargain of the neighborhood,” she said of the sprawling rustic ranch-style house, which is listed with Jon Douglas Co.

“The Westside never suffered when the rest of the city was in the doldrums,” Gordon said. “This is the first time the Westside is suffering. I haven’t seen this before.”

Whether on the Eastside or the Westside, thousands of home sellers are feeling the extraordinary pain of this housing market. But as psychotherapist Lee said, “Things will get better. Things will turn around. People do survive this.”

And there is a happy ending to this story. Two weeks after he was interviewed, Chuck Bowen called this reporter and announced, “I’ve sold my home!” He trimmed several thousand dollars more off his asking price, which proved irresistible to a buyer. “Believe me,” Bowen said, “it was worth it.”