{"id":1424,"date":"2012-09-24T13:42:52","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T13:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2013-01-16T23:07:15","modified_gmt":"2013-01-16T23:07:15","slug":"foreclosures-house-sharing-one-giant-leap-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1424","title":{"rendered":"foreclosures; house sharing; one giant leap… forward?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buckeye Back Road Tours cont…<\/strong>\u00a0 In Wapakoneta, Ohio, I talked with a real estate appraiser who works in about a 100-mile radius around here.\u00a0 He said in the aftermath of the housing bubble bursting, there is still<\/em> a significant number of empty homes in this particular area (after foreclosures) that are also in various states of disrepair.\u00a0 I responded that we had recently done a campaign tour in Florida where one in 10 houses were now in foreclosure in that state.\u00a0 (We had met with one homeowner just outside of Tallahassee who hadn’t made a mortgage payment for quite some time, yet was still in his home — simply because the courts were so backed up with similar cases, he said.)\u00a0 I explained to the appraiser in Wapakoneta that our platform calls for some people to consider “house sharing.”\u00a0 That is, whether it’s two families sharing a home, or a family renting out a room in a home, or…\u00a0 You share the mortgage payment.\u00a0 You share heating, cooling, lighting…\u00a0 You share lawn equipment, appliances, and so on..\u00a0 It simply makes sense, common sense.\u00a0 (Especially in the face of actually losing<\/em> your home altogether.)\u00a0 The appraiser responded:\u00a0 “It depends on how big the house is…”\u00a0 And there’s the rub.\u00a0 Many of us in America have gotten more and more possessive about “our space,” especially in comparison to two-thirds of the people in the rest of the world who either live in slums or in tremendously smaller and more modest (by our standards) dwellings in general.\u00a0 At St. Joseph’s Church in Wapakoneta, shortly after this conversation, I picked up a book that contained modern-day, alleged messages (“interior locutions”) from the Blessed Virgin Mary to a priest, Fr. Stefanis Gobi, in Italy.\u00a0 An excerpt from one of these messages from Mary reads:\u00a0 “Humanity has distanced itself from the Lord in order to follow the idols of comfort and pleasure, of pride and money, of hatred and impurity…”<\/em> \u00a0\u00a0 Wouldn’t this ‘false idol comfort thing,’ for example, indeed be germane to us Americans wanting as much house space as possible, and as much stuff (nice furniture, all the modern appliances, wide screen TVs…) as possible filling those houses… in the face of such dire poverty elsewhere in the world?\u00a0\u00a0 Note:<\/strong>\u00a0 Speaking of ‘space,’ Wapakoneta is the hometown of recently deceased astronaut Neil (“…one giant leap for mankind.”<\/strong>) Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.\u00a0 But was it a giant leap forward?\u00a0 That is, while we’re out trying to “conquer space,” one billion people live in these squalid slum conditions on this<\/em> planet.\u00a0 Wouldn’t that money be better spent on helping them?\u00a0 If we’re paying attention to the gospel message, it would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buckeye Back Road Tours cont…\u00a0 In Wapakoneta, Ohio, I talked with a real estate appraiser who works in about a 100-mile radius around here.\u00a0 He said in the aftermath of the housing bubble bursting, there is still a significant number …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1438,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}