Standing in the den of a foreclosed home and gazing up at the blue West Virginia sky through a hole in the ceiling where a stovepipe once penetrated, I asked the Realtor, “Think anyone might want to come fix that?” And sure enough, by the time I came back for a second look, someone had ripped a piece of flagstone out of the walkway and indelicately shoved it over the hole, where it now, more or less, prevented a wholesale flood from each passing storm.

This foreclosure market, I’ve learned, isn’t for the faint of heart.

Never a man to miss a deal, I spent much of the past year with a very understanding Realtor, touring foreclosures, looking for a permanent home, vacation home, investment property, or whatever, greed dripping coldly from the corners of my mouth like icicles as I conceived of profiting from the misfortune of others.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for a confluence of market forces and Darwinian theory to make me understand that our long national foreclosure nightmare is more than likely going to fix itself without any help from any banker, lender, bureaucrat, or government program. Or me. Plainly put, much of this “surplus housing inventory” that is the stuff of economic nightmares is simply going to rot on the vine.

Houses do not take well to sitting empty, and everything the banks and government are doing to try to fix the problem is instead frequently guaranteeing that the homes remain unoccupied, often unheated, and for the most part unmaintained. In fact, the “asset management companies” that the banks send to stabilize vacated properties often create more damage and theft than they prevent. The above-referenced missing stovepipe had been attached to an also-missing woodstove that the asset management company had sold for scrap. Never mind that a winter’s worth of elements were about to come through the hole in the roof.

In another home, a bank had balked at paying the electric bill, so the power was turned off, and with it the sump pump that kept the basement dry. After a few months, water in the basement was four feet deep and mold had engulfed the walls of the home.

Virtually every home we saw had been stripped of its gutters, the aluminum presumably sold for scrap. Without gutters, water seeps directly into the foundation where it freezes and melts and can destroy a basement in no time.

On one house, vacant since the fall, the bank ordered the asset management company to winterize the property—a task it finally got around to in March. Which, or course, was two or three months after the pipes had already burst, flooding the entire first floor.

Many people and politicians want to punish the bankers for going on a five-year lending bender that all but passed out mortgage cash to potted plants. I understand the outrage, but punishing the banks at this point seems like fining the guy who got hit by a speeding bus for leaving the scene of an accident. The banks are going to be roundly spanked without anyone’s help.

Even in the throes of crisis, the market remains efficient. A bank that foolishly lends will end up owning that upon which it foolishly lent. And when it reclaims the asset, it drives home the point that financiers make poor property managers.

It also became clear that the mortgage crisis extends beyond the banks. Home acquisition had become an assembly line tolerating no slowpokes. Titles, appraisals, and inspections had become formalities. But now, many folks in the real estate business who had become used to the fast buck are being forced to relearn their trade. For example, on an 80-year-old farmhouse I looked at, an appraiser made much of a missing section of linoleum in the kitchen—but completely missed the fact that the home had no heating system.

At that point, I decided the foreclosure market was too stirring for me and backed out. But I remain a keen spectator. I watch as the prices on these poor homes decrease by tens of thousands of dollars. It’s not uncommon for a house to lose $50,000 in value for the want of a few hundred dollars in maintenance.

In the city, many of these homes will be bought up wholesale and bulldozed. In the country, they will be sold based on the value of their land, well, and septic system, and will be reclaimed by either man or nature depending on the handiness of the buyer.

Either way, untold millions of dollars of value will be lost to the banks. But then, they made untold millions in the devil-may-care boom years. Markets usually average out, and the only mystery is why this lesson has to be learned time and time again.