you're right erica, he should be giving money to distressed homeowners. No, he isn't screwing anyone that wasn't already dead to begin with. I don't understand how you can be so clueless at times.

Think.

If people don't buy the distresssed real estate then it will be even more distressed. And organizing funds to pump moeny into buying distressed real estate doesn't cause the home to go into foreclosure. Unlike, say prostitution where buying it causes it to be offered.

Your notion that having fewer buyers would "help" business or persons with distressed real estate is kinda backwards.

Yeah, he's not screwing homeowners. He's just reaping the rewards of their prior screwage - a scavenger, not a predator.

I pretty much agree with everything @1-3. Bad as this may sound on the surface, this is really where the future of real estate is at this point... scavenging the bones.

Amen to 1-4. This post is demagoguery.

Every other poster here has already taken ECB to task for the fundamental wrong-headedness of this argument. (Not only does a fund like this not harm foreclosed homeowners, buy buying distressed properties and improving them it help to put a floor on the real estate market and thus reduce foreclosures on other at-risk properties.)

I'd just like to add that this is a perfect illustration of the wolly-headed suspicion that left-wingers like ECB harbor for anything associated with filthy lucre. Perhaps this emberassingly public stuble will make ECB re-think her knee-jerk antipathy for anything involving the words "market" and "profit". But probably not.

What does it say about me that I want to get in on this?

@6

You must not have read the thread where she said your bike will flip if you don't have rear brakes. ECB does not re-think. Ever.

sounds like easy money...I got $500 to spare can i invest/ while slowly adding more and more watching the dough roll in
nice

Yes, the last thing we need is more buyers in the housing market. Clearly there's tons and tons of.. oh. You said he's BUYING HOUSES?

Hi. He and others willing to take a risky bet are the liquidity. That's right, risk; if it was a sure thing, you'd buy too.

I'm not against people making money, I try to make more every day. I'm also not partial to most (or any) of ECB's posts, but vulture fund is an appropriate name for such activity. Certainly, buying foreclosed homes can be very good for a neighborhood or city. However, funds like these present banks with an option other than negotiating with the person being foreclosed upon and is a continuation of the situation which has, in large part, caused all the foreclosures: speculative buying. Additionally, you have people who are more interested in making a profit than they are in the stability of the neighborhood.

Erica, the depth of your self-righteous, narrow-minded ignorance never fails to amaze and disgust. Please stop. Please stop posting. Please stop writing. Please stop breathing, if you must. The world (or at least the Slog) will be a much better place.

Everybody has got to make a living somehow. And what better place to try to get cash to maintain the standard of living for a disgraced public figure than realestate (Ted Haggard should have taken notes). But perchance there is no market for bought houses ... he's not going to be making as much money as he would hope.

It doesn't really bother me much, I have little to no desire to own (and maintain!) a home any time in the future. I look at all those home owners and think to myself suckers!

Well, at least he'll have plenty more money for expensive hookers.

@11, in a healthy majority of cases, don't the speculative buyers WANT the properties to maintain or increase in value and thus help maintain the neighborhoods?

Exceptions that come to mind being downtown New London, CT and the ever eyesore downtown Eugene, OR.

Spitzer was one of the only people aggressively moving to regulate the predatory lending practices that led to the mortgage collapse in the first place. But he hired prostitutes, so therefore he must be publicly shamed and judgement must be passed on all his subsequent actions. The important thing is that everybody be sorted into their proper "all the way good" or "all the way bad and therefore safe to vilify" categories to prevent any troublesome moral ambiguity, such as the possibility that a public figure may take principled stances in the political arena while engaging in private conduct that we find objectionable.

@16: Ah, but spending big money on hookers while investigating the companies they work for was a lapse of judgement and ethics so breathtaking as to be worthy of all the ridicule and scorn heaped upon him. There is no contradiction in that.

#17: Fair enough, but if the alternative is for an elected official charged with protecting the interests of the citizens of his state to look the other way and refrain from investigating those companies, I'd prefer the sin of hypocrisy to the sin of negligent inaction. Again, Spitzer was one of the only politicians on the right side of the issues surrounding the unethical practices of the lending industry, and now thanks to the highly selective public revelations about his traffic with prostitutes (do you really think companies that specialized in $1000/hour plus escorts didn't have any other high-profile, politically vulnerable patrons?) the only remaining media narrative about him, even according to dyed-in-the-wool liberals like Erica, is about the naughty things he was doing with his penis while in office. And now, his actions in the private sector must all be viewed through this lens so as to confirm that he was in fact a Bad Person all along.

This sort of obsessive sorting of public figures into heroes (i.e. people whose skeletons remain, for the moment, in the closet) and pariahs may make for an exciting tabloid-style narrative, but it mostly serves to distract public attention from issues that matter to most people. As opposed to the whereabouts of Spitzer's (or, say, Bill Clinton's) penis, which really matters very little to most people.