People can chose hotels based on the hotel’s policies regardless left-luggage. Nikki Bailey didn’t chose to interact with the repossession company and the bank that it allegedly worked for.
Exactly. If doing my job badly had consequences like that, and I didn’t already have a checklist from my employer showing exactly what steps I was supposed to take to demonstrate that any bad outcome wasn’t through negligence, I’d demand one, or, failing that, create such a checklist myself.
I would expect that the absence of such guidelines would suffice to demonstrate that any negligence lay with my employer and not with me.
Here’s a very current for-instance of this. And, fortuitously enough, it has something to say about the necessity of intent:
Kane is the AG of Pennsylvania.
How about a happy medium. If items are taken from a repossessed house they must be stored for at least 30 days and not destroyed. If destroyed within the 30 days then that is a willful violation of the law and subject to criminal prosecution.
I would support this, but one argument against it is that, in the vast majority of foreclosures they do, in fact, get the right house. The question to ask is whether it would, then, be an unreasonable burden on the banks to ask them to store all that stuff, at their cost, in order to eliminate or mitigate what is, in fact, quite a rare problem.
This seems like one of those things where it’s better for everyone—the victim and, possibly, the bank—if the remedy is not a preventative measure like storage, but instead is a large penalty for fucking up. That way the victims get compensated plus substantial punitive damages, and the bank has to pay, but probably also ends up paying less, in the long run, than it would pay to store the property from hundreds or even thousands of foreclosures.
I hope you’re not quoting this in some attempt to suggest that the earlier discussion about intent was incorrect.
I agree with the huge penalty but look at it this way, I’m going to give you two choices:
a) I take all your stuff in your house and put it in storage. Ooops I messed up so I truck all your stuff back.
b) I take all your stuff and destroy it. Ooops I messed up so I pay a $50,000 fine and spend 6 months in jail and you’re SOL.
What would you prefer. Also, I have a real problem with banks being able to seize personal belonging with a foreclosure. I understand the logic but something about it strikes me as wrong. They got the house already and they didn’t make a loan on the possessions. If they want the personal property to make up the difference, why doesn’t that have to go through the court like any other creditor?
They can’t. They assume the possessions are abandoned.
Which, of course, brings us back in a big circle to the issue of getting the right house.
It seems to me, even if you think you’ve got the right house, and even if people often do abandon some of their possessions in foreclosed houses, that it might be possible for a relatively intelligent person to work out, just from looking at the state of the house and what has been left behind, whether the place is currently being lived in.
Is there fresh milk and other food in the fridge? Is there non-moldy bread on the counter? Are there oranges or bananas in the fruit bowl? Are there still family pictures all over the place? Electronic equipment like a working television, a computer? Wardrobes full of clothing, shoes, linens?
I understand that people who are losing their home might not always have all their shit together, but most of them have stuff that they value, and that they would not leave behind when they get evicted. Even if you’ve lost your house, you still need clothes.
At the very least, it should be possible to look around and have a sense of whether you might have the wrong place, whether you might need to double-check the address with the removal company, or the bank.
I suggested that upthread, that in some of these cases, it should be obvious that the home was not abandoned.
Having helped out the owners in my last apt building to the point where they listed me as “Apt manager”, I can tell you that a lot of dudes just take what they can carry and walk out. They leave behind clothes, photos, jewelry, electronics, mementoes and in one case, even their cat.
So the units did tend to look a little like they had been rummaged thru, but much good crap is often left behind.