A mindless fuckwit claims he can’t work, yet has the energy to plant the seed for 18, yes eighteen, little fuckwits who have allegedly damaged a Habitat for Humanity House in Scranton, PA, to the point that the dwelling was condemned by code officials.
The mind fucking BOGGLES at that. 18 kids that you can’t afford. Then you trash the one place you had a chance to live in, which was provided to you by the sweat of well meaning people. And you TRASH IT.
I have zero sympathy for them and I can’t believe Habitat is going to help them rebuild. What a sickening waste of funds.
The exact same thing happened with a family in the province of Quebec [they only had two or three kids though]. The community wanted to help and managed to find them a home. One day, they simply disappeared without leaving a forwarding address:rolleyes:, after literally ransacking the place, with several months rent unpaid, of course. They showed pics on TV. Unfuckingbelievable. Should they be traced, I think they should do some jail time and the kids be placed.
That reminds me of a similar story back in Ventura County, California, where I used to live. HFH worked hard and got a homeless couple into a newly built modest home, and in the first week they lived there, they got into a drunken brawl and totally trashed the house.
When they were interviewed afterwards, they off-handedly said something like, “Yeah, it was our fault. We got out of hand.” They then returned to their life in the river bottom.
I’ve heard of turning the other cheek, but this is ridiculous.
I’m still trying to figure out how in the name of all that’s holy you manage to get a $4,000 electric bill. How long do you have to have every light in the place burning and the a/c on with the windows open to use $4000 of electricity? Our electric bill, even with leaving the porch light on till 3 in the morning, forgetting to turn off lights in the basement, and air conditioning a big house in the North Carolina summertime, is less than $100/month. Usually, a lot less. At that rate, it would take us four years or more to run up that kind of bill, and ain’t no utility in the world gonna let you keep service with payments that late.
Crap…I tried to post a response right before I left work, but my browser crashed, and I guess it didn’t take.
Anyway, what I was saying is that I live in the Scranton area and I’ve been hearing about this on the news for the past few days. While I understand the goals of HFH, I also think that in many cases, people don’t appreciate things that they didn’t have to work for. Having put quite a bit of sweat equity into my own house in the past 2 years, I honestly and truly feel like it’s mine in a way that I don’t think I could if someone had handed me the keys to a beautiful new home and said “Here, have at it.”
As for their $4k electric bill…well, to give you an idea of what electricity runs in this area, I’m single and my electric bill is about $40/month. For this, I:
Run an electric clothes dryer, electric water heater and electric stove
Have about half the lights in the house on at any given moment when I’m home and awake (which, granted, is only about 6 hours per weekday)
Run a computer and TV during most waking hours
Run a window unit room A/C every night
Now, there are limits to how much more electricity a family of 20 can use, because even if you ran every light in the house, it’s not going to use 20x more electricity than 1 person would. But, assuming worst case, taking 20x a single person’s average usage would put you at about $800/month. So, their electric bill was at least 5 months behind, probably more.
Families who get Habitat homes have to put in ‘sweat equity’ too. They don’t just get “handed the keys to a beautiful home.”
[quote]
Each family set to receive a Habitat home is required to compete a set amount of sweat equity volunteer hours. These hours would ideally be completed before the family moves into their new home. All members of the family are encouraged to work together to complete their sweat equity hours.
Sweat equity can be made up of all types of volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity with the emphasis being on the actual building of their new home and other homes of Habitat families"
But agreed, this family took a great opportunity and threw it down the toilet. They don’t deserve a second chance. There are so many more deserving.
autz, my bad on the actual HFH process…what you quoted wasn’t included in any of the articles I read. I was thinking that it was more along the lines of the low-income housing that the husband of a friend of mine used to do work on. He was an electrician, and he said that he would never, ever worry about running out of work, because the county kept them busy doing the rounds of renovating these housing projects every few years.
It was required every few years, because the people living in this housing would invariably trash the places beyond belief. He said that he had been in places where they had to totally tear out all of the drywall because it had been pissed on so many times, it was rotting and falling out. Carpeting would be ruined, doors and cabinets punched in, everything covered in dog or cat shit. Amazing. That’s what I mean when I say that people don’t give a shit about what’s been handed to them. The county and/or city keeps running these “second chance” programs, giving low income people nice places to live and they treat it as an entitlement and then kick the shit out of it.
It’s frustrating to know that your tax dollars are pouring into programs like this (which aren’t volunteer arrangements like HFH…people like my electrician friend were getting paid big bucks to do this work) and it all comes to naught.
When I’ve worked on Habitat houses, the owners-to-be were working there right alongside us volunteers…and they’d usually keep going after we left, and put in as many weeknights as they could spare, too.
Habitat houses are hardly palatial, even if intended to house a family of 20, so they shouldn’t take a fortune to heat or cool, unless one’s not trying to conserve electricity. I’m gonna give 'em a generous (IMHO) $250/month for the electricity, which would put them 16 months behind on their bill. Or just running up the bill without giving a flip.
And trashing the house is inexcusable. Most places have a long waiting list of people who’d like to get a Habitat house. These folks should go to the back of the line. (And their kids should be placed for adoption.)
If I were helping out with the Scranton chapter of HfH, I’d be informing them that if they gave this family another chance right away, I’d be putting down my hammer.
You’ve painted with too broad a brush here. All housing authorities are not created equal. I am the director of construction for a PHA, and I can tell you that we run a pretty tight operation (we receive top ratings from auditors every year). People who trash our property are evicted immediately, made to pay restitution, and removed from elegibility. The large majority of our tenants are happy to have a roof over their heads, and at least try to keep the places livable.
The larger problem is that there is constant turnover or ‘churn’ in these houses. It’s like having ten different people driving your car. The wear and tear is proportionately higher than with a single user, so maintenance and repair frequencies are higher.
There is also the issue of “deferred maintenance”, which is another term for “neglect”. If regular maintenance is not done on a structure (usually for lack of funding), it soon becomes a renovation project: the old ‘pay me now or pay me later’ concept. The problem with deferring the work is that future dollars are more costly than present dollars. A $500K window/siding replacement project today will cost approximately $815K ten years from now (assuming 5%/yr inflation).
I tend to agree, as another Scranton native. This is just insane. These people were profiled on one of the TV newsmagazines and in a magazine before they moved in. HfH is a wonderful charity that i’ve contributed to, and volunteered a few hours to.
Unfortunately, in this situation, HfH is damned if they do, damned if they don’t/won’t. Its bad enough that they have to help, and they lose a bit of funding either way from this fiasco.
Not to stir up a birth control debate, BUT 18 FUCKING KIDS!!! The man should be fucking goats, at least then he wont have more children.
You know, I remember somewhere reading about a family whom HforH was helping. A couple had a large number of children (10?), but then adopted their eight (?) nieces and nephews who were left orphaned. I can’t find anything on Google, but is it possible that this is the same family?
There are certain lights that use up a lot of electricity. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was growing something (maybe a lot of something), and that’s how the electric bill got so high.
This hardly surprises me. I work with homeless people finding them apartments, and some of the damage they have caused is unbelievable. I’ve experienced people moving into houses after we get the proper approvals from both the City and the Housing Authority (rent subsidy) involved. And then six months later the same places hand us a three page list of repairs that have to be done so we can get the rent.
About the electricity bills: One of our tenants kept the thermostat on 90 and the windows opened in the dead of winter. We caught her when we got the $400 bill.
