The famous Reno drunk and the housing-market hangover
In 2006, Malcolm Gladwell published a story in The New Yorker called “Million Dollar Murray.” It profiled Murray Barr, an affable, mostly-toothless homeless man who had cost the city of Reno hundreds of thousands of dollars over the ten years he’d lived on the streets, in hospital bills, substance-abuse treatment costs, ambulance transportation, and much more.
It was a beat cop named Patrick O’Bryan, who’d spent years picking Murray up after one of his drunken binges, who tried to tally up the cost of those cycles in and out of the system. “It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,” O’Bryan told Gladwell.
The chart above shows the million dollar Murrays of the housing market. It uses data from Black Knight to plot repeat foreclosures – those loans that have gone through the foreclosure process more than once – and when they were taken out. Looked at one way, it’s a perfect visual representation of the housing bubble – it crests in 2006, the exact moment a lot of other housing-related trends peaked, and falls off after that.
Looked at another way, it represents the hard-luck cases that are sapping resources and “muddying the picture” of how healthy the housing-finance system really is, in the words of Daren Blomquist, a vice president at Attom Data Solutions, which tracks real estate trends like foreclosures.