30,000 pounds of belongings stretched up and down the DC sidewalk. They all belonged to one woman who was evicted after she couldn’t make rent.
The woman, a housekeeper unemployed for 2 1/2 years, was saving them to send back to relatives in South America. “I cried when I went to Mexico to see my family,” she told the Washington Post. “Look at how they live. I feel it’s my job to look out for them.”
The woman owed her landlord over $10,000 and hadn’t been able to keep up with a court-ordered payment schedule that required her to pay $300 on top of her $1,318 rent, let alone the roughly $5,000 it would have cost to ship all the stuff.
A local mover volunteered to help her cart out her belongings and store it for free, but they had to give up after three trucks were filled, with more junk still out on the sidewalk.
When they were done, a chaotic sight remained: vacuum cleaners piled next to broken picture frames piled next to soup pots filled with Legos. A wet wipes warmer sat next to a Christmas-themed moose statue. Here, a book titled, “How to Survive the Loss of Love;” there, a broken lampshade. Every piece of furniture appeared broken or damaged.“Anything is usable,” Diaz said. “Believe me.”
Maybe if instead of hoarding she could have held a yard sale and sent the proceeds back to her family?
D.C. woman is evicted, and with her, 30,000 pounds of belongings [Washington Post] (Thanks to Alice!)
Huge Eviction Fills Streets at 11th and Otis, NW in Columbia Heights [Prince of Petworth]
D.C. hoarder: Marshals find ‘unbelievable’ amount of stuff at Columbia Heights eviction [TBD]
More From Consumerist
-
People Of Nunavut Tired Of Paying $30 For Coffee, $65/lb. For Chicken
-
Woman On The Hook For $220K In Online Music Sharing Saga After Losing Appeal In Third Trial
-
6 Everyday Food Items That Have Soared In Price
-
Woman Figures Any Price Tag Will Do, Switches Store Labels Around To Score Cheap Toys
-
USPS Doesn’t Notice That My Package Is Now 32 Lbs. Lighter — And No Longer Contains My Stuff
I’m not a hoarder, I’m saving things for my relatives!
I’ll have relatives some day!
I make my own relatives at home (five of ‘em, to be exact).
lol
Brilliant. That’s go to be the best “make my own at home” comment I’ve seen in a long, long time.
I have one in the oven right now!
Is it done yet?, is it done yet?, is it done yet?
I love your icon, Alvis. And yeah, I find it hard that she couldn’t get work for 2.5 years as a housekeeper or doing any minimum wage job. She could have also sold some of her belongings. I think this person is mentally ill.
This isn’t hoarding per say, you see this ALL THE TIME in Texas. Mexicans with truck loads of what most people would consider junk, being brought south across the border and given to family in Mexico. They’ll be driving a pickup towing another broken-down pickup, packed with crap, late at night.
I’ve got no sympathy for the lady, maybe she should have gotten a much smaller apartment, or moved out of DC after not being able to find a job for 2.5 years.
“being brought south across the border and given to family in Mexico.”
30,000lbs of stuff in an apartment is quite different from the mexican dude in the 30 year old ford that has a 10 foot iron cage installed for hauling all the stuff off for sale. The key words here are “For Sale”.
Maybe if this person spent more time “cleaning” and less time “hording” they might not be in this situation. And yes, there is plenty of market for good/cheap house cleaner. The key word here again is good. We just replace a team of 2 house cleaners with 1 that that works about the same amount of hours but actually does a good job. (as in not the absolute minimum they they think they can get away with).
per se
not “per say”
Sorry, a pet peeve of mine.
Maybe if instead of hoarding she could have held a yard sale and sent the proceeds back to her family?
Well said sir
Good idea, but not well said. Poor grammar.
Or perhaps sold the things and paid her rent?
Agreed.
Agreed.
It’s not well said at all. Hoarding is a mental issue, not a logic one.
right, ’cause hoarders are a lost cause one should never attempt to use sanity or logic to help them…
Well, actually, no. Mental disabilities and disorders, by definition, make the people who have them behave in sub-obtimal and illogical ways.
I’m experience with hoarding through family, friends, and less-so, personally.
It’s absolutely impossible to explain ‘what those people are thinking’ because half the time they aren’t, or hardly are at least.
It’s ‘oh I might need that’ but not in the sense of ‘I might need that for this, this, or this’ there is absolutely no logic to it.
As a concept it’s the ‘new thing’ but the actual disorder has been around for a long time, it’s only increased in coverage recently due to various factors including but not limited to: reality tv, increased poverty, decreased mental health care, etc.
Provided she really was going to send stuff (…) then that’s a great idea.
Sounds like an episode of Hoarders on A&E…
Hoarding isn’t a choice, it’s a mental illness.
thats what i say about picking my nose too!
If picking your nose is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
This.
I would call that OCD, unless you’re saving the winners from your nose, in which case, sure, there’s some Hoarding going on.
Queue a bunch of posters saying, “Well why don’t they just throw the things away?” with no comprehension of mental illness and only a basic understanding of Wikipedia’s psychology page to back up their shitty reasoning.
How long does it have to go on until you accumulate 10,000 pounds of stuff inside an apartment; so much stuff that even after 3 full trucks the moving company gave up instead of thinking “well there’s only X amount left, lets keep going”.
I find it hard to believe that during the collecting period there was no one who went inside her apartment and saw her heaps of stuff, or no one knew her well enough to know she was doing this. Someone should have stepped in, someone should have told her it was a problem, someone should have pointed her in the right direction.
I also find it difficult to believe, unless she is severely mentally handicapped, that she was unaware that it was becoming a problem.
It may be difficult for someone to overcome their own shortfalls, but it is not impossible, and it is certainly within the realm of possibility for them to realize what is going on and seek help.
You say you don’t understand how this could’ve happened because you don’t understand the illness. Please watch the show Hoarders or read any number of articles on the Internet explaining things. Want some simple answers? No one knew her place was like that because she never let anyone in. It’s easy to accumulate things if you never throw anything away. Think of how much shit you buy and throw away (magazines, tissues, wrapping paper, boxes, bags, cans, the list goes on) that someone who hoards wouldn’t get rid of. Also, it’s a MENTAL ILLNESS. Someone telling her she has a problem isn’t going to help. Do you understand mental illnesses or compulsive behavior at all? Your post says you don’t.
you really have no idea.
Neither do you, apparently.
I also find it difficult to believe, unless she is severely mentally handicapped, that she was unaware that it was becoming a problem.
It’s called denial. In some cases they know they have a problem, but they don’t know how to ask for help, or are ashamed. So they disconnect from it or cling to their rationalizations. One lady on Hoarders had over 100 cats (more than half were dead, when they finally cleaned up) and it got out of her control, so she gave up.
As a Level 1 hoarder, I can attest that it’s not that hard. As for how you can let it get that way, it starts slowly. You get tired or sick, and you slack. Then, when you feel better, you try to clean, but it’s a big job, and you feel overwhelmed, so you swear you will do it next weekend, and it continues.
I can vouch for this comment. However, do people actually get diagnosed with “compulsive hoarding” or is it considered general compulsive behavior?
OCD
Not necessarily. The symptom can also be caused by anxiety disorders and the like. Not necessarily OCD.
The DSM-IV will have this as a separate disorder in the next issue. (Here is more about this publication http://allpsych.com/disorders/dsm.html)
Hoarding is an extreme anxiety thing and is treatable, but it’s very hard and just cleaning up the mess does nothing to resolve the underlying issue. Think of it like people who overeat for emotional reasons: even if they lose the weight, if they don’t deal with whatever made them do it, it’ll just happen again.
Technically, it’s a symptom of a (very treatable) mental illness.
If you have insurance and can afford treatment….and are willing to admit you’re ill in the first place…
i have a theory about this. in some cases hoarding is definitely a symptom of a larger mental problem, but in most cases, i think it is an intrinsic survival response. i’d theorize that most hoarders fall at or below the poverty line, or began their hoarding when they were struggling financially.
i’d also theorize that on a larger socioeconomic level, hoarding increases as economic conditions within a society decrease. we’ve seen this during past economic events (how many of us had parents or grandparents that saved everything because of their experiences in the great depression?) & i reckon that our recent obsession with this phenomenon is largely due to the recent decline in our economic condition as a society.
There are a few types of hoarders. If you can seperate yourself from the pain they go through, its facinating.
1) The type you mention.
2) The type who associates a memory or emotion with a “thing.” The problem is that their ability to differentiate between things we’d consider an appropriate association (e.g. photo’s, rings, gifts, etc.) and things that aren’t (a soda bottle, etc.) is broken. So, in essence they try to feel or remember through their things.
3) The type that feel like they’re going to need something or miss out on information (e.g. people who pile magazines or papers, thinking they’ll get to them). Again, their ability to draw a logical line (e.g. 30 corkscrews) is broken. When they’re asked to throw them away, its like asking someone to forget something (even thought they haven’t learned it yet) or to intentionally make them unsafe (e.g. what if they run out of can openers).
BOT- I think she probably had some hoarding tendencies combined with the admirable desire to help her family.
Nothing is a choice anymore. Everything is an illness. It’s the age of no personal responsibility.
That’s nice you’re raging against the machine and all, but hoarding is actually a mental illness.
+1
No, -2.
Sorry, I had to account for your incorrect +1.
Oh, and -10 for you also.
Source? Hoarding can be a symptom of mental illness. But it isn’t in itself a “mental illness”. AFAIK, there still isn’t a section in the APA’s DSM for “Hoarding.”
While technically correct, I think you’re kinda splitting hairs. Hoarding is a symptom of OCD or anxiety disorders, but often the symptom is SO huge that it’s easy for the layperson to refer to it as the illness itself. It’s only when you really get to know a hoarder that you see how far beyond just the piles of stuff that the problem goes. They are also usually extremely picky about the behavior of others- other people aren’t careful with their things, other people are untrustworthy, and often no one can live up to their demands and expectations. I am moving out of a house owned by a woman who, among other things, has hoarding as a symptom of her OCD and other mental problems. Among those problems: being completely convinced that her mental health problems are all due to smoking pot. After months of “living clean” with no change in the underlying mental problems, she is convinced that she is actually better and now normal… despite the piles of junk and garbage that make her rooms almost uninhabitable (not to mention, filthy dirty) and her repeated trips to garage sales for more stuff.
This.
“My kid isn’t spoiled–he is just hyper and has ADD.”
No….you don’t spank your kid enough and you keep him hopped up on HFCS and PopTarts.
“I’m not fat, I have a disease.”
No, the problem is that you eat too much and don’t move unless it is to get from your tv to the toilet. The diseases are a result of the obesity that you have brought upon yourself.
“I’m sorry my dog ran into the street after y’all! My kid opened the door and out he went!”
Nope. You have failed to actually train your dog (and potentially the kid) to respond to commands.
I’ve heard all this crap within the last week. A significant percentage of people nowadays just hate accepting responsibility and helping others. They would rather cry for pity and claim it is someone else’s fault.
I love you.
Sugar DOES NOT MAKE A CHILD “HYPER”!!! That has been tested more than any other theory in modern science. Now go away and h8t something else.
You clearly don’t have either the intelligence or the common sense to understand what is being said. And “h8″? Seriously?
Are you 12 years old? Can’t type out a full 4-letter word? Too lazy?
See, it was your CHOICE to spell incorrectly. Just like it’s my choice to call you on the childish behaviour and intentional lack of understanding that you display.
Get it now?
ADD exists fool, I happen to have it, and no it’s not because of sugar.. not that it actually makes you hyper. I really really REALLY can’t see how my upbringing has anything to do with it, I had a ton of rules to go by and other then having ADD and the annoying effects of it, i’m not an idiot who causes crap. This whole thing of; if you have ADD you are off the walls and a mess is just annoying and completely wrong.
I guess you don’t think schizophrenia, it is just a life style choice. OCD is just a guy who likes to wash his hands until they are raw? I guess Alzheimers is just a person with a shitty memory.Because YOU don’t have it, means it is not a disease. You prove yourself to be stupid, and wrong on the facts, and also a giant douchebag.
I read stupid people.
It’s not the dog’s choice to get rabies, but we still put it down.
You’re comparing a mental illness to a fatal disease AND THEN implying we should kill hoarders? You sound like a real compassionate person.
You fell for the troll bait. They’re obviously using hyperbole for humor. NO JOKES ON THE INTERNET!
No, it can be a symptom of mental illness. It is not in itself mental illness. Some people just like to collect junk and they aren’t mentally ill.
PollyQ, so I suppose you buy in to every possible explanation given by “psychology” and every new EXCUSE invented for people like this to justify their behaviour.
“I’m a hoarder, look on me and pity.”
Not EVERYTHING is a mental illness, you know.
Learn to think critically.
Hoarding is simply a poor choice of lifestyle. That’s it, that’s all.
And yes, it is a choice. In much the same way I can CHOOSE whether to hang on to a peice of garbage or throw it away. Or I can CHOOSE to have relations with someone of the same gender. Or I can CHOOSE to go to work by bus or by car.
Everything in life is choice. Everything.
And I can CHOOSE at any point to stop using the heroin. I have complete control over it. I can stop any time I want to.
Growing up in a third world country is a choice. Growing up in a poor neighborhood and attending a poor school full of uncaring teachers is a choice. Growing up in a single parent household is a choice.
I’m really glad you cleared up this whole life thing for me. I had thought at one point that some people simply had unfortunate circumstances to deal with, but now I realize that they just make poor choices. They should have chosen to be part of the Hilton family.
Nice stab against homosexuality there, by the way.
Mexico isn’t really South America…it’s still part of the North American continent, but might best be described as “Latin America”.
Shhh!
We like to pretend it isn’t. Less brown people on our continent, y’know?
That’s not necessary.
Mexico is part of North America, FWIW.
It was a joke, clearly.
Nice over-reaction though.
Latin America or Central America seem to be the names du jour.
Still, it is and will always be part of North America (think NAFTA!) despite the saddening number of maps I see that cut it off :/
She owed 10k in back rent, I would’ve kicked her out too.
Hoarders always have an excuse to why they have so much crap.
Maybe if she didn’t buy all that crap, she wouldn’t owe 10k then.
You don’t have to buy to hoard. Freecycling makes it easy.
I agree… and garage sales and thrift stores allow you to buy large volumes of stuff for very little money. I sold a ton of clothes at my recent yard sale for 25 cents an item- about half of it was bought by one woman who couldn’t pass up the bargain even though she kept saying that she didn’t really need any of it. My guess was that she was a hoarder- but I didn’t really care since I was happy to sell my stuff to whoever wanted it.
Used toget people like that at the library, buying out old books. They couldn’t let the books go b/c they knew we’d throw them out and they hated the waste.
True. Or a relative in Guatemala willed her the stuff. Or a jetliner crashed in her backyard and she salvaged it from the wreckage. Or, or, or…
I’ll go with the odds. Chances are that she spent some cash on some of this stuff instead of paying her rent.
I’d say, since she was a “housekeeper”, she probably kept stuff that was meant to be thrown away.
I feel bad for the roommate who apparently didn’t know about the eviction until after it happened. And he couldn’t find his green card among all the belongings out on the street.
I think it’s nice that a local moving company helped for free by taking three truck loads of her belongings to a storage until where they’ll store them for free for a month, but I have doubts that this woman will have a place of her own to live and to bring the stuff to within a month.
Her relatives in Latin America don’t want broken, useless crap either.
Broken frames, broken lampshade, legos in soup pots? Why is she bringing *more* junk into mexico?
I’d take the Legos; they’re expensive new, and just as expensive used.
Holy crap, yes they ARE! I thought about buying some plain ole blocks for my kids – nothing in a set, just generic Legos – and I couldn’t believe how expensive they were! I mean, Legos are awesome, and I definitely played the hell out of mine as a kid, but sheesh.
I still have a 40lb bin of Lego blocks I’ve had since I was a kid (I’m late 20s now). That way my own kids will have a ton of Lego without me needing to spend a ton of money. Sadly, the Legos are the only toys from my childhood I elected to keep.
Hoarding is really debilitating, isn’t it? I feel bad for these people. I know it’s easy to go, “Oh, you stupid dummy, just throw it out!” But for someone like this lady, doing that would cause her mental anguish. It’s a terrible position to be in.
Thank you for injecting a note of compassion into this discussion.
Hoarding is a genuine disorder just like OCD, panic disorder, depression…. No one would CHOOSE to suffer any of those. They can ruin your life — as seems to have happened with this poor woman.
Everything is a disorder or “illness” now-a-days.
It’s really hard to tell the REAL disorders from the HUNDREDS of made up ones to justify borderline acceptable behaviour.
I tend to believe that this is NOT a disorder, but just a really confused person with a really bad learned behaviour.
I really don’t think of this as a “disorder”. Just a REALLY bad habit that’s been taken to extremes.
Good thing you’re a psychologist with hundreds of hours of research and peer-reviewed papers, then.
My grandma was a hoarder and would recluse and get distraught if she found out we’d thrown something of hers out. We’d have to go in there when she was at a doctor appointment and throw $h!t out. She was so attached to all that crap. I’ll never understand.
Even if it wouldn’t bother you personally, do you really not understand why someone would be upset to find out that someone went through their personal effects and threw things away without permission? It’s not all that different, in practical terms, from being robbed.
I’ve watched a couple of those hoarder shows, and while I’m not a hoarder myself, I’m baffled when family members of hoarders are surprised that people are angry when they do that.
I’m no hoarder, but even I’ve had well-meaning (I guess) people throw away things of mine a few times, and I still get mad thinking about it.
It’s disrespectful, and it’s absolutely a violation of someone’s personal space and effects.
I understand that hoarding is a frustrating condition, and that it places a real burden on family members; but going behind someone’s back and discarding their belongings can really only make things worse. People hoard because they feel insecure. You don’t help the situation by giving them reason to feel even more insecure.
“went through their personal effects” … that does not describe hoarders belongings. As in the story, “soup pot filled with legos” can hardly be called “personal effects”.
So while I agree with you that “personal affects” are .. well .. personal, the problem with Hoarders is they deemed EVERYTHING as personal, which is the mental disorder. A rotten canalope personal? a dead rat personal? a twisty tie personal?
So while the mental disorder is a valid, the illusion it creates should not be validated by others. ie: It’s one thing to acknowledge a drunk see’s a pink elephant … it’s another to fix the pink elephant dinner.
Get the point?
Wow, you’re hostile.
The point is that it’s not up to you to decide what is and is not someone’s ‘personal effects,’ or what they value.
If someone you know is hoarding dead rats and rotten cantaloupes, it’s still better to deal with it directly, rather than just sneaking around behind someone’s back.
But not everything is as obviously garbage as that, either.
The point is that, when you take it upon yourself to go through someone’s property (personal effects or not) and discard things you don’t personally see the value of, you’re fundamentally disrespecting and violating that person. And when you do that, you can only exacerbate their condition.
So, it’s OK to throw away someone else’s stuff as long as you think it’s not ‘personal’ stuff?
You’re not helping either by being an apologist.
Stop making excuses for people with this really bad habit. (Although I agree that someone throwing your stuff out is not cool… sometimes it’s the only way.)
When I was younger, I would hang on to EVERYTHING. I was quite a pack rat. My parents did their parental duties and threw out the junk I had accumulated and I was pissed, but in the end, it turned out to HELP me. I didn’t know how to tell the difference between something I MIGHT need and something I WOULD need. Turns out that all the stuff I though I might need, I didn’t.
I don’t thank my parents for much, cruel peices of crap that they are.. but I will thank them for this.
In MY case it was a matter of learning how to behave. Noone defended me like all the apologists on this site that think this is some disorder. It’s not. I speak from experience.
It’s usually either a lack of knowledge, or refusal to admit to that knowledge. That’s all.
The anxiety results from the lack of understanding WHY this is a bad behaviour.
Personal responsibility FTW.
Holy smokes, where did she live in all this?!
Well, that’s a lot of money not paid in rent. I think the owner put up quite a bit and actually on the generous side.
God only knows what it cost the landlord to get someone to move all that crap out. I hope they don’t also add insult to injury and charge him for a bulk garbage pickup to get that shit away from the front of the building and into a dump where it obviously belongs.
$1318 rent?? If after 2 1/2 years of unemployment you’re still staying in a place that expensive you should have seen the writing on the wall.
in DC that’s pretty much a slum.
$1318 a month apartment that can hold 30k lbs worth of crap is amazingly cheap. Just about the only way you could do better is if you were a congressman getting in on that house run by the crazy christian cult on C Street.
The cost of moving, even without 30,000 pounds of stuff, is pretty high too. In this area, even if you downsized and moved into suburbs of Virginia or Maryland way out at the end of the metro lines, you’re still going to be paying at least 800-900 a month, and frankly, probably closer to 1100-1200. And that’s before the cost of the moving truck or uhaul or whatever else.
I feel bad for her. She needs professional help. Maybe this will be a wake-up call.
Why are you feeling bad?
You can’t help someone by feeling bad for them. This is a situation of her own choosing, whether consciously or sub-consciously. The solution will also be of her own choosing, assuming she makes that choice.
If you really want to help someone, the key is to point out what they are doing wrong to them, not “Oh, you poor thing… let me bake you a pie.”.
Mexico is in North America.
Looks like they weren’t reading closely when they summarized the Post story. The woman has relatives in Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia, so they probably would have been better off simply listing the countries.
I have a relative who is a hoarder, and she uses almost exactly this same kind of justification. “Well, someone might need it some day…” She’s got a whole bunch of plastic rakes that her neighbors gave her when they moved, and her reason for keeping them all is “well, I am sure someone will need a rake some day, and now they can have one of these instead of buying a new one!” Never mind that most people would rather just go to Home Depot and get their own rake for $20 than through the hassle of arranging the time to pick up an old, used rake.
It’s really frustrating, especially since it’s borne out of some weird sense of altruism so it’s nearly impossible to get her to think there’s anything wrong.
Yeah. My mom still has moldering books that she’s absolutely convinced that her (theoretical) grandkids will love. This despite the fact that some of them are so screwed up they’re missing pages, pages are torn, and some have enough mold that I wouldn’t let a kid anywhere near them anyway. But she’s shipped them around every time she moves, nonetheless.
My dad does the same damn thing. He seems to get worse the tighter money gets. What makes it even worse than that is he lives out on the family farm. So he has over 300 acres to fill up with crap. He has a couple good collections going on.
Hell, my mother is about as bad. Last summer when I visited her place (my sister was living with her at the time) mom and I went to a family reunion and my sister stayed behind because of her job. She told me “Don’t you dare tell mom I’m going to be cleaning up her house while you’re gone.”.
Its sometimes a generational thing too, my dad’s parents and his older sisters lived through the great depression so they had to squeeze every quarter till the eagle shit and get every drop of milk out of the cows. When you have little to your name, you tend to save what few possessions you have in the hopes of repairing them or getting money from them.
Just looking at all that crap makes my skin crawl. Now I’m even more committed to that neighbourhood yard sale we’re planning.
I’m sort of a hoarder… I still have computer crap that will work in old 386′s… I really should dump that stuff heh.. but what if I need it…
Everything else (except tools) I toss…
Except now you i386 computer is probably considered HAZMAT
I’m the same way with old computer junk. sometimes I give in and toss some stuff then a week later realize I actually do need that old serial mouse and now I’m screwed.
Haha ya, I got some old stuff too that I have not gotten the opportunity to recycle. Old stuff like that is only really good for the material it is made out of. Nowadays with so much being flash-based, it cries tears of lead with less than a Pentium 4…
I am not a hoarder overall, but certain things I have always saved for whatever reason. I have every single computer I have ever owned. I still have the DOS based system I had from who knows when and my first web experience with Prodigy sitting in the basement.
The other thing I tend to keep are magazines. I rationalize it by saying there might be an article in there I want to read one day. I have some from back in the 80′s. Luckily I am not over run with them
Best code ever!
Reminds me of this Kathy Griffin bit about the Hoarders show…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rb9ahaJ464
I did not find the kathy griffin bit to be funny at all. overall she has lost her edge and is no longer funny. but probably I have changed.
Why would someone that is unemployed for 2 1/2 years have an apartment with $1,300 rent? Thats ridiculous.
I would have read this last year and thought the exact same thing. Now that I’ve lived in metro DC for a year, I understand why – $1300 is insanely cheap for NW DC neighborhoods. And where better to try and find a job? There are diplomats, gov’t employees, etc – someone needs to have their house cleaned.
I’m sure it made sense in her mind, all things considered.
Someone call Clean House
Please don’t. I love the premise of that show and would watch it, but Niecy Nash’s voice grates on me. Now the british show How Clean Is Your House is another story.
Niecy Nash is awesome and if you don’t like her then you are not cool.
Wow.
Nice over-generalization.
In most parts of California the landlord would be required by law to store all of the belongings for a period of, I believe, 90 days all whilst sending the required certified mail to the evictees, who may not have a address…
Sooo….let me get this straight, money to travel to Mexico, money to buy 30,000 lbs of crap, money to send back to mexico, but no money to pay her obligations and pay her debt….cry her a river and make her cross back over another. I wish I could globe trot and buy all the toys my family and i want, but oh yeah I have debt and bills and taxes…
2 1/2 years of not working. Living in an apartment that costs over twice as much as where I’m stuck. I’m glad America was supporting her laziness and hoarding. These are the causes our hard earned tax dollars need to be going towards.
Wow. I don’t even think I have 300 pounds of stuff.
I’m lost. Is this a “Hoarders” episode or does she need money to move back to South America?
$1318 a month rent? My mortgage and taxes on my little 1700 sq ft home on a sweet half an acre are $850. There is a lot of chatter now that renting is the way to go, that buying a home is not as good an investment as it used to be. I don’t see it. Even with prices still in the toilet my house is worth twice as much as when I bought it and my monthly payments are far less than renting in my area.
That said, think I’ll go clean out the attic.
Maybe you have never heard of the concept of location location location in real estate? I can guarantee you do not have a half acre in DC that has a mortgage that low. By the way, she actually paid ZERO in rent for over 8 months, so actually she made out MUCH better than you do.
The building probably gave a sigh of relief to have all that weight off its structure. 15 tons of belongings is nothing to sneeze at and you would be lucky if any of those floors didn’t have any sag in them.
WTF is a wet wipes warmer?
It’s a box you put baby wipes in to keep them warm so you don’t wipe your little ones butt with cold wipes and make them scream at 4am:)
I’ll take the Lego’s.
I think it’s a thing that warms baby wipes so they’re not cold on the baby’s butt. Yeah, I know. My mother used an old cold wet washrag on us and we survived!
That was a reply to prismatist, but the website is wonky today.
I don’t get it. It’s her responsibility to ship a bunch of broken crap to Mexico so they can have a bunch of useless crap there? How does that help anyone?
Eviction sucks, but this was years in the making.
I haven’t combed the comments, but I thought I’d point out that Mexico is not in South America. It’s in North America.
You would have snagged two comments that already pointed that out.
I don’t even want to think about the various bugs living in that place with her and all her stuff. It’s a shame, too, because the building looks like a historic old one with lots of interesting detail.
i would’ve garage sale her excess belongings
whats more important ? a roof over your head or a few extras ?
I want to know if she’s in this country legally. If not, deport her.
Maybe someone should have told her about Lista de Craig so that she could have sold her valuables in the 2.5 years she wasn’t working and sent the money home (plus pay the rent). Then of course there is always a venta de garage cada semana…
Who’s going to clean it up? Does the landlord have the right to block the sidewalk with tons of junk? I would think not. I doubt this woman can afford to pay a trash collector to remove it. I wonder what the city will do.
Is she related to the Vogels?
could had a heck of street sale and might have enough money to get a new place….