The 4400

Erin Ellia is a sub-prime borrower, frustrated homeowner, thwarted fixer-upper, and (when she has time) writer based in Weymouth, Massachusetts. She blogs about all these gobs of fun at The House and I and has just finished a memoir of the same name, painfully recounting the whole hellacious experience.

Okay, so it was really only 4000 jobs the nation lost this month, but the way they’re talking about it, you’d think all those workers had been abducted by aliens. I could have told them the building trades were going in the toilet months ago. You know how I knew?

Building-trade employer and employee, sittin’ right here under a single roof.

It’s a pretty simple formula, really. People lose their houses, they tend to stop doing any renovation work on them (nuts, I know, but there you have it). People stop purchasing new houses, new houses tend to stop getting built (crazy!). No renovation work, no new construction… no building-trade jobs. Ipso facto. Q.E.D.

And duh.

Now, it’s the next step nobody’s cottoned on to yet. The 4400 – and I’m keeping that number, because it’s close enough and seriously, how do they know? – the 4400 painters and plumbers and electricians and carpenters who lost their jobs this month (my Johnny among them) are not the owners of construction companies. They are the hourly-wage slags who maybe, if they were very lucky (and very stupid), bought houses of their own not long ago. And, because they are hourly-wage slags who (up till a month ago) worked in the building trades, they probably had to get sub-prime mortgages to make it happen. We did.

If they were so far beyond stupid that they actually thought they were being smart, then they bought fixer-uppers with their subprime pound of flesh. They worked in the building trades, they figured. They knew People. They could get professional work done for short money and wind up owning more house than they’d actually paid for. It was a win-win situation. The real estate market never goes anywhere but up. If they decided not to sell the house, they could always refinance later.

Now these 4400, if they’re anything like us (which we know at least two of them are), have mortgages they never really deserved in the first place, and half-done renovation projects that they can’t afford to finish. Oh, sure, there’s all these unemployed painters and plumbers and electricians and carpenters milling around, but they’re not going to work for free just because they have the time (I know Johnny isn’t). Plus, paint and pipes and wires and 2x4s cost money. Home Depot dumped its own construction division for a discount price a month ago – they’ve still got to make their earnout somewhere.

So the end result is more work not getting done. More money not being spent. More mortgages foreclosed upon. And more workers losing jobs. Ipso facto. Q.E.D.

And d’oh.

Us, well, our kitchen is sawzalled down the middle – new on one side, old on the other – and we’ll have to leave it that way for a while. But when the furnace that came with the house exploded we couldn’t exactly choose not to replace it. A New England winter body needs her heat, no matter how unemployed her husband is. So we hired a cut-rate plumber (and got exactly what we paid for, but at least Cut-Rate Plumber was employed, by us, for a couple grueling weeks, so he won’t show up in the August statistics). We spent our rainy-day fund (thank god it hasn’t rained in Massachusetts in what feels like years), but at least we’ll go into the winter with our new furnace intact.

We just won’t be able to afford to turn it on.