"I have no clue where I'll be," come Friday, says Greg Staffa in a phone interview with HousingWatch. The Farmington, Minn. man claims that is when he will be thrown out of his modest townhouse into the bitter Minnesota cold at week's end -- and all because he is overweight. Oh, let's just skip the political correctness here. Because he's "fat." Staffa's troubles began, he says, when he was injured on the job as a baggage handler for Northwest Airlines back in 2006. At the time, the now 34-year old Staffa weighed in at 275 pounds. He stands 5'9, he says.
A doctor hired by Northwest wrote a report blaming Staffa's injuries on his extra weight. That, says Staffa, led to a cascading series of events that left him unemployed and unable to pay the mortgage on his home since October 2008.
The townhouse cost him $155,000 and he had a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, he says.
"That report changed everything," Staffa tells HousingWatch, referring to the doc who called him fat. Had it not been for that report, he says he'd either still be working with his seniority intact, or he would be out on workman's comp. Either way, he would have the money to make his monthly mortgage payments, and wouldn't be in this dire situation, he says.
It wouldn't be the first time Staffa found himself without a home. For a period in 2001, he lived out of his car, and later undertook a road trip trip/publicity tour to call attention to the plight of homeless people.
Now, Staffa is using his situation -- and his flair for PR -- to take on what he sees as the widespread view that people in foreclosure are "deadbeats." His website, www.becauseimfat.com, chronicles his weight and shelter woes, and goes to lengths to demonstrate his own sense of personal responsibility. Staffa, who wears a patriotic shirt in the photo on his site, wants you to know that he's not had a credit card since 2000; that he bought a less expensive house than he qualified for; and that he's never been on welfare or food stamps. "We forget that each foreclosure is a story," he writes.
I asked Staffa repeatedly if he really thought he was losing his home because he is fat. He hesitated before answering, and then went into a long explanation on how his being called fat by the doctor eventually led him to where he is at today: screwed! If Staffa really believes that he is about to lose the roof over his head because of the fat hanging over his belt, then his current weight is not likely to help any. He has ballooned, he says, from 275 pounds back in 2006 to 290 pounds now.
Do you think Mr. Staffa's argument carries any weight?
Continued at link with video,poll,and readers comments
Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:
What say you all?
IMHO there are too many unknowns and evasions for me to come down completely on his side.
His positives are he was obviously living within his means by buying a moderate house and having no credit card debt.
His negatives are for some reason he always fails to mention WHAT the basis was of his injury. It's hard to make a determination on the fairness of the finding if we don't know how he was injured and the extent of his injury.
He also skims over the fact that he DID go back to work for them for some unknown reason. We only know this because of his complaint about losing his security and getting paid less. Sounds to ME like it was determined that he was physically unable to work his baggage handler job,so he,the union,and the airline all agreed to employ him at a lower level with less pay. He doesn't want to talk about this. Maybe because by that time he had already been told he was too fat to continue to work as a baggage handler without losing the extra weight,and he was unwilling to diet and exercise to lose it. In other words, it was his own fault that he had to take a lesser job and he AGREED to accept that lesser job.
And,of course,since the airline was sold and jobs were cut,it was just his bad luck that he didn't have enough seniority to survive the job cuts due to his new job classification. This part had NOTHING to do with him being fat.
Face it,this guy had the ability to lose the extra weight and the time to lose some of it while he was out of work on disability. He made no effort to do that despite not being so overweight that he couldn't move or exercise and he has nobody to blame but himself for being fat.
