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2. Also you probably should not buy a foreclosed house if you already have one that you're living in and the marshals are banging at the door. (You should, however, get a lawyer!)

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Anyway, it was somewhat likely that, after the investment of some work on this apartment that was being trashed out, such as providing it with new door hinges and appliances, the association would find a renter unafraid of a possibly surprising ending to his rental agreement term in exchange for a below-market rent. That would be a best outcome.

The others would most likely find no purchase for their attempts to collect (the owner was protected by bankruptcy), and certainly the bank had little incentive to collect the mortgage, although their claims on the title would likely make finding a purchaser difficult.

One of the few chairs remaining in the near-vacant condo was occupied by someone on the other side, as it were. Someone not in bankruptcy, for one thing. This person had recently made a $200,000 offer on two-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town. (Needless to say, this town was not New York City.)

But when he had gone to get a mortgage, the bank had balked, because that apartment now assessed at half that value, and so now his current offer for the two-bedroom was at something like $78,000, having come up from something like $65,000 or $72,000. That offer number was jiggling and that title too was somewhat not entirely not cloudy, because that condo association was trying to get a bit of the sale money for past unpaid maintenance under the old owner, which seems, if logical, a bit short-sighted of the association's best interests. They ran the risk of receiving zero dollars instead of some dollars, by dragging the potential new owner into someone else's debt.

But then, we're pretty much all subject to someone else's debt these days, even those of us who rent. Renters are shielded from what is happening with a property, except when they receive a stray envelope addressed to their landlords, or the records pop up online-and the record-keeping systems, when I look up mortgages and sales online, seem to me to be bogged down and very tardy. I imagine the one or two municipal employees in each town in America with the responsibility of making these things public crouched in some little cave, with a stack of depressing white and red and yellow paper towering over their little desks. (Really, it's probably all done by computers. With near- or off-shored labor-somewhere in Utah or Israel.)

In any event, there it was: the magical $78,000 two-bedroom apartment. The steal of a lifetime. The great American get-ahead.

I bring this up in part because this Sunday, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, there is a panel at noon which includes Naomi Klein and Kurt Andersen and Jordan Flaherty and also Paul Reyes. His new book, Exiles in Eden-some of which is in the August issue of Harper's-is an account of going to work for his father, who has for some time now been a trasher-outer of abandoned and foreclosed homes. In the book, Reyes follows the trail of breadcrumbs of the people who've abandoned or been evicted from their houses to the foreclosure auctions, and along the way meets people like the housing advocates who've installed squatters in vacant properties.

(The panel is slotted against "Me... In The World," which stars Sam Lipsyte, and a panel called "Pop Life: Music, Memory, and America's Coming of Age," with Ta-Nehisi Coates, which may be more appealing and relaxing and better-attended, but then we all have to make difficult choices in these times.)

Reyes did the first reading from his book the other week and something odd happened. He did not get author-friendly questions about the precious process of writing his book. Instead, a long discussion ensued among the audience members about the financial system and the housing market. In the audience were brokers and bankers and homeowners and renters. A mass of anecdotage and experience and theory was shared. It was something like an impromptu consciousness-raising session, very thorough, and when the audience left, everyone had had time to sift through his and her experiences with the state of our financial system and to incorporate some fresh input.

"The audience reaction was exactly what I'd hoped for," Reyes wrote to me the other day. "I'm certainly happy to stand up there and blather for twenty minutes, but I'd much rather have an intense discussion about this issue and hear what people have been through and what their ideas are."

Although he'll be taking this conversation to the Times' Opinionator blog's Living Rooms section soon, he does not have at this time many in-person readings scheduled; author reading tours are not booked by publishers much these days.

"I'm trying to work the promotion of the book into a split personality tour of sorts–between the narrative journalist and housing wonk," Reyes wrote. "If all goes well, I'll drop in on university classes in the daytime, then hit the bookstores at night. I'll wear a different pair of glasses for each role, of course."

Next week, on the 14th, Reyes will be reading as well at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore. Perhaps you'd like him to visit your fine local bookstore, classroom or community center. His email address is on his website.

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We'll do this in some very nice round numbers!

There's 1.2 million houses in New York City, of the city's 3.3 million housing units. (So: twice as many apartments as houses, basically.)

So, already, you know: someone owns 3.3 million housing units! Clearly lots of these are owned in big batches-landlords like Pinnacle, for a random example, own 21,000 housing units in different buildings.

Still, despite the big landlords, home ownership rate among all New York City residents is almost exactly 1 in 3.

(It skews hard by borough, obviously: in Staten Island, it's more than 2 in 3; in Queens, it's about 1 in 2; in Manhattan, it's 1 in 4.)

Home owners are, unsurprisingly, way more likely to be wealthy. The median income of renters is around $36,000. (By the way, of all renters, nearly 1 in 3 pay more than half their income in rent.) The median income of a home owner is twice that of a renter.

In Manhattan, there's about 750,000 households, where about 1.5 million people live. (There are something like 80,000 single-family dwellings-you know, "houses." All told, about 150,000 of Manhattan's housing units are owner-occupied. You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who owns a single-family dwelling in Manhattan is a millionaire.)

1.2 million of Manhattanites are over 18-and only about half of the people who are older than 25 have a college degree.

So we can discount from our "rich list" those without college degrees, pretty much, because, duh-which means that, eerily, the number of people who are allegedly millionaires-on-paper in New York City is almost exactly equal to the number of adults who reside in Manhattan who have a college degree.

So, wait, some of you are saying: I'm over 25 and have a college degree and I live in Manhattan and I'm not a millionaire!

That's because you're a disgrace. If you're over 25, college-educated, a native English speaker, you reside in Manhattan and are not a millionaire? Technically you are a huge failure.

But don't worry too much. The real reason you're not a millionaire is because there's apparently a really large number of millionaires-on-paper in Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, obviously.

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