Everything that's taken from the house goes to a landfill?

This is ridiculous. Not only am I flabbergasted by the fact that people are leaving their valuables, but more importantly, how are these people cleaning house not taking things for themselves? Who watches them?

@gatewaytoheaven:

Edit: "does anyone want the end table? anyone want to take it home."

Guess they do take it home.

@gatewaytoheaven: I'd at least donate the stuff to charity.

None of that stuff in the video is considered "valuables". It's all mass produced Walmart, Ikea, and Pier1 junk. No priceless heirlooms here.

@gatewaytoheaven: What do you mean who's watching them? I'm sure the bank wants them to get the stuff out of the house any way possible. I'm sure they don't care if it ends up in a landfill or someone's house.

I forgot where, but I saw this months ago. It's really sad. Also what a waste, this stuff can be easily be donated to charities, but the problem is the logistics coordinating mentioned just wont let it happen.

That "computer" was a Packard Bell. I would've left it behind too.

@albear: i agree. I know Habitat for Humanity is always in need of furniture and the like. Even Salvation Army. How hard is it for these "junk chuckers" to drop off a load of used furniture and such at a charity, thrift store instead of a landfill?

What's really sad, I've read stories of them finding remains of pets that people left behind.

These companies should haul the stuff to a warehouse first, and leg people purchase it. They could make money, and people could get good deals instead of the landfill getting it all.

As someone who has done this before, you do get alot of nice stuff. But once your house is full and all your friends houses are full, the dumpster is where it all goes. Charities don't always cooperate to come out and pick stuff up, and then they want to nit-pick what they take to the point where a single day's worth of clean-out work doubles. If they even show up at all. Saddest stuff I found was a fully prepped nursery and kitchen full of wedding gifts. The owners had just walked away from the house and all the stuff. Sickest was the fishtank of dead stuff we had to empty and then remove. The smell was terrible.

Ohhhh there is so much stuff I could use that is just being thrown out there.

granted the people who leave the house are being incredibly wasteful. If it were me getting foreclosed on, I would try to sell as much stuff as I could, because obviously these people are going through financial troubles. so sad..

@gatewaytoheaven: One of these crews was cleaning out the house across the street from me a few months ago. I went over and they offered me anything I wanted to take.. weight bench, bicycles, all kinds of stuff.

Can't they make some kind of public announcement for the goods in the houses? Craigslist is good for other things than just meeting trannies.

Seems like a giant waste.

@sarsbar: They tried that. It didn't work well.

@gatewaytoheaven: I know a person who represents the bank when the people are being evicted. At least in Wisconsin, all the good stuff is hauled away and put in storage. The previous owners have to pay the moving and storage fees to get it back. Otherwise they get to auction it to recoup their $$.

Anything covered in dog urine (common) or a health risk to the movers, the truck or the storage unit, is left for the trashout guys who come later.

Some people I know who rent houses say college students (in particular) leave behind all KINDS of stuff, including computers. They sell it on e-bay and Craig's List.

Little surprised there isn't more selling going on here, honestly. My friendly neighborhood scavenger (WHO NEEDS TO START MAKING HIS SPRING ROUNDS SO I CAN GET RID OF RENOVATION TRASH) would be happy to sort it for them, haul it all away, and sell it for a nice profit.

Hmmm... a jar of kimchee and a rice cooker? I'm guessing a Korean family used to live in there.

@acrobaticrabbit: At least around here, the Habitat store is fairly choosy, because it (understandably) wants to use its square footage for items that reliably sell, not for stuff that should have been chucked. I suspect that in an area with a lot of foreclosures, they're even choosier.

@gerrylum: I have a rice cooker and kimchi at my house and I'm not Korean. I also sometimes eat taco's, pasta and my drool and Im neither Hispanic, Italian or Retarded.

Wacky Liberals!!!

@gatewaytoheaven:

I'd have to say that they probably do take some things. The Supreme Court ruled that if it's in a dumpster it's fair game for anyone to take. However, if this is your 10th foreclosure, what can you possibly still need? You've already looted 'til your heart's content and you don't need anything else.

I know that I'd have a big screen TV, tho.

One of the catches to "Give it to charity" would be that you have to take a lot more care with the items. More loads with less stuff. Because Goodwill doesn't want a table with a broken leg anymore than you would. If you're just chucking it, you don't have to worry about condition.

Then there are the logistics. Could the charity handle an entire houseful of stuff at once? While Habitat for Humanity may seek furniture, do they have a place to store it until they have somewhere to put it? What should they do with stuff that they don't have a use for?

@Yankees368:

no doubt

@acrobaticrabbit: @kc2gvx:

The problem is that there are so many foreclosures in the area that the used furniture is virtually worthless. There are far more people in the area looking to get rid of their crap than there are people to buy it.

I say curb the big items with a "FREE" sign. If it isn't picked up trash service should get it... It's something.

@sarsbar: They tried, but they have extra work to do when the charity doesn't show or leaves stuff behind.

@Eyebrows McGee: The college dump season is quite astonishing, really. I've been offered sofas under a year old, looking in quite nice condition, for free, by a student's mom when I was walking by. And not that long ago at UPenn, they'd just put all of the discarded crap out on the sidewalk, so the student area had piles of apartment contents taller than people lining the streets in the student residential area.

The problem is that the glut and the quality level means there's not much of a market for it. Ideally, you'd have free storage and dole it out over the course of the subsequent year, but even then it might not be worth the cost to drag the stuff out. I suspect it's not that dissimilar in foreclosure hotspots in CA and FL.

Put the good stuff on the curb with a "free" sign or something. I hate seeing all this waste. Where I live there is a big shortage of used furniture or used pretty much anything. Everyone is looking for used things and people are not getting rid of things as much.

@albear: They showed the first portion on the PBS NewsHour a while back. Maybe that's where you saw it?

This kind of thing happens every day in the apartment management industry. I used to work as a maintenance tech/porter for a year and a half and almost 1/2 of my job was trashing out evicted apartments. Even in that scenario you wouldn't believe the kinds of things people left behind. Including like another poster mentioned, their household pets. There was one apartment where a 9 month old boxer puppy who had died was left in a box of garbage on the upstairs patio to rot, and a living puppy was locked in an empty bedroom with a pile of dog food in the middle of the floor. Needless to say that apartment was the worst I had ever seen.

@floraposte: I have faith in my scavenger -- he'd make it work! :) But if you're getting it for free, "Not much of a market" is still a market, and you're making SOMETHING off it.

This can sometimes be very sad. While my wife and I were stationed overseas with the military, her mother suffered a mental breakdown and stopped paying the bills, including mortgage. Eventually, she was foreclosed on, and she had to move in with family. By the time we learned anything about it, my wife's entire childhood was gone. All her pictures, her childhood stuffed animals, everything had been trashed, with no hope of recovery. My wife was, and still is to an extent, devastated.

@gerrylum: I'm going to go out on a limb here and agree with you. Not only is there Kimchi and a rice cooker, but there is gochujang (spicy miso paste) and a box of Nongshim ramen. They *may* not be Korean but I'd give slim odds.

Don't know the exact legal reasoning, but personal items left behind will become the property of the title holder (bank) at some point of time.

When I was a teen I worked for an uncle's small construction company during summers. He did a lot of rental property clean-up and remodels.

There were times we had to shovel up the crap and hold it for the rental company to evaluate. Most of the time it really was crap

Other times we were free to take what we wanted, like we really wanted puke covered drapes, dog carcasses etc.

But sometimes there was really good stuff. Complete living & dining room sets that looked like they came right off the showroom floor, kids toys & sporting goods (we played BB during lunch breaks with a really nice leather BB), working TV and stereos.

The weird thing is the rental company would hold the house with the goods for weeks or months(?) waiting for the rightful owner to return and claim the stuff.

@Kuonji: Holy crap. I just noticed the bottle of Soju there too. They are either the most non-korean Koreans out there, or they ARE KOREAN

@Corporate-Shill:

We didn't sell the stuff, we kept the good stuff. A lot of extended family members (friends and neighbors) going off to college would suddendly have a TV or overstuffed chair for their dorm room

So glad I'm not in this position. Scares me that I've started looking into buying my first place. I sometimes feel like a leech moving in on some unfortunate victim that's fallen on hard times.

/shrug. Good report though.

@gerrylum: *sigh* I have kimchee, rice cooker, 10 pound bag of rice, nongshim ramen, various other Korean ramen, gochujang, sesame oil, disposable chopsticks, Korean dried seaweed... possibly some various other Korean things.

I'm white. Really white. I just like Korean food.

@Kuonji:

I'm not korean and I've been known to have jars of kimchi, bottles of soju, and a rice cooker. Lived in Korea, though. And I wouldn't leave my rice cooker behind, WTF...hard to find a good rice cooker that doesn't cost a fortune in the US.

If not for people leaving photos behind, would Robocop have gotten his memories back?

@Nate Mata: Ohh crap thats worse than the pork brains...

Estate sales like what we have here must not be popular in that part of the country. Heck you don't even have to pay for the ad anymore, just list on craigslist, sit at a table with a cash box and have people pay for whats left inside the home. Much better than hauling it away in a dumpster, what people don't pay for probably should go into the trash.

Of course if the area you live in is so bad that no one has any money for anything, people might not even show up. But estate sales usually generate a long line here at opening.

@floraposte: Exactly right. The problem is that moving and storage tends to be more expensive than simply buying new stuff the next year.

Dorm refrigerators are a perfect example. At the college I went to, there was an official on campus moving and storage agency that charged $40 to store a refrigerator for the summer. But unless you had a car, you had to pay them another $40 to come to your dorm to pick it up and then return it again in the. So $80 to store a dorm fridge (in a storage locker where it might get really dirty), or you could just buy a new one at Wal Mart in the fall for the same price.

When you're losing your house to foreclosure, you probably have almost no free cash lying around, so it's probably not so simple to hire someone to carry out that big screen TV, let alone to pass the credit check to rent a storage locker where you can keep it.

@TechnoDestructo: Seriously, I was eyeing that rice cooker in the video. Ours is kind of crappy, but I really don't want to spend the money on a new one right now.

@Reid Antonacchio: If/When true, they certainly don't deserver anyone's pity -- or taxpayer bailout.

I am a scavenger at heart. I would love to do this job part time. I think some one could really stock a secondhand store with this stuff or have some killer yardsales. I have seen lots of treasures on roadshow that were found.

And somebody, somewhere, is boohooing about losing everything.

Did you guys even watch the video?

They explained that charity doesn't work out because the charity trucks don't show up, or don't take very much, and the people are willing to take things for themselves, but many just don't have the room.

I'm sure that if there are valuables (computers, whatnot) left behind, that they at least consider taking them home.