Recession Taxi
September 10, 2009Jon Brooks Comments Off
Here’s what you need to know about Jay Field: He’s been a camp counselor, house painter, swimming pool technician, book shelver, cake jockey, would-be Internet mogul, and public radio journalist. But he lost that last job at the start of the recession and “finding a new gig, in or out of journalism, has been far harder than I would have ever imagined.” So now he’s a cab driver, a blogging cab driver. Recession Taxi includes musings on his new lifestyle, plus a bit of original reporting. An extract from a post called Eviction Man:
You can’t get away from recession stories. They’re everywhere you go.
I pulled up to this building a few minutes early and there was drama. Two patrol cars marked “Cook County Sheriff” were parked out front… Ten or fifteen minutes passed before the deputies calmly walked out of the building and got in their squad cars…As the officers drove off, a tall, older-looking gentleman with a neatly trimmed, white beard walked out, holding a vacuum.
“Eviction,” said Joseph Laubinger, a real estate agent from Grayslake, IL.
The bank had foreclosed.
But the owner, it turns out, had been dead for some time.
There aren’t too many things you can do in this world, after they return your ashes to the earth. But take heart. You can still be evicted!
“It’s hard,” said Laubinger, as he loaded his vacuum into the trunk of his Toyota Prius. “There are a lot of people who got a bad break. It’s people who lost jobs (and are) crushed with bills.”…(He) says he’s never been busier.
“I work approximately 16, 17, 18 hours a day.”
He says foreclosure evictions were a small part of his business between 1995 and 2002. Then, when the housing market heated up, he worked full-time on the retail side of things. But since 2006, it’s been evictions, evictions, evictions–often seven days a week.
Check it out.
