Where the Foreclosures Are
With regard to the following chart in The New York Times, Ezra Klein writes “What we had is less a foreclosure problem than a foreclosures in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida problem. The way you get 42 states with foreclosure rates beneath the national average is that those last eight states are post-crash dystopias inhabited mainly by squatters and feral dogs. And the way eight states bring down the economy is that the foreclosed assets were heavily leveraged: The whole country might as well have been the Golden State given that Citibank would bet $56 dollars on every buck of California mortgages.”
Brian Beutler offers an important corrective to this, observing that “it’s important to keep in mind that this was all happening against a backdrop of rising national foreclosure rates.” And that’s right. Many states that had a below-average 2008 foreclosure rate have rates that would have been above average back in 2006 or any other more typical year.
But what I really want is some more fine-grained data. When I was at the Atlantic, we were able to put together a county-level map showing foreclosure rates (no reference to national averages), for my prescient charticle “There Goes the Neighborhood” in our January/February 2008 issue:
Unfortunately, the charticle was so prescient that the data is now hopelessly outdated. And I don’t really know how to get more updated data or make such a good-looking map. At any rate, back in that 2007 data you could see some trends in the county-level data that would be obscured in state-level data. Illinois had, at that time, a modest overall foreclosure problem but a pretty serious concentration in the immediate vicinity of Chicago. Metro Texas and rural Texas look like two different states on a county-by-county level. But California, at that time, had a pretty broad-based and systemic wave of foreclosures running through all the populated parts of the state.
51 Responses to “Where the Foreclosures Are”
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March 4th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Short Steve Sailer:
It’s where the Hispanics are! that’s why!
Oh, and black people!
March 4th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Foreclosures occur because black people are deficient in IQ, in inverse correlation to their penis size.
This makes not good with abstract thought, but very good with sports, music, sex and violence.
I realized this when my wife was gangbanged by three black men. They forced me to watch and play my banjo, and my wife had to bang a tambourine, which was very painful for her since her legs were behind her head.
The black penises slid in and out with perfect rhythm.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Metro Texas & rural Texas are in two different centuries, and the 20th isn’t one of them.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Metro Texas and rural Texas look like two different states on a county-by-county level.
That’s where they built the new houses. Seriously: those are the areas where the overwhelming majority of the population lives. California happens to have some very large counties (namely Riverside) that had started urbanizing in the West. San Diego is surrounded by a foreclosure ring of fire. It’s all very concentrated.
Anyways, I knew I had seen one: Ritholtz had a county level foreclosure heat map for end of 2008 back in January. I don’t know why Lawton, Oklahoma is in the shitter. There’s nothing there.
max
['So... data. Looks bad.']
March 4th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Damn. It ate my comment.
max
['Sigh.']
March 4th, 2009 at 11:30 am
The problem is that the map compares Q4 to the average of 2008. It may be an indication of accelerating problems, but I’m not sure what it says about the number of foreclosures in general.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:33 am
An even more accurate pictures would be by Zip Codes. The large red blocks of California shown as San Bernardino and Riverside Counties are misleading. Both counties are very large and mostly desert. Almost all the foreclosures occur in the south west portion of San Bernardino and the a strip of western Riverside county, an area known as the Inland Empire. To be sure this area has the most foreclosures but it also had some of the fastest development.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:34 am
I hear the “blame the illegals” meme all the time for the foreclosure problems. I think some radio personality looked at a map and then said something like, “that’s where all the illegals are!” Unfortunately, it stuck and gets repeated.
I’m sure some bought houses and some of those houses are in foreclosure, but I doubt that illegal aliens are the sole cause of the whole foreclosure mess.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:43 am
The first map is relevant because while it ignores the foreclosure rate variance within states and the rising average it shows on average this problem is not equally distributed nationally.
It shouldn’t be surprising then that many voters are upset by Obama’s mortgage relief plan. And how much responsibility do the states with the largest foreclosure problem (Florida, Nevada, and California) deserve? I can’t imagine the people of Seattle, for instance, being too happy with all this.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Would be interesting to see foreclosures and unemployment by congressional district.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:51 am
I would love to see this map with an overlay of how these particular areas voted in the last election or two.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
But California, at that time, had a pretty broad-based and systemic wave of foreclosures running through all the populated parts of the state.
A minor nitpick, but it’s really more like all the outer suburbs of the populated parts of the state. In the the more dense population centers you don’t really see foreclosures as much.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
“And I don’t really know how to get more updated data”
Yeah. what Al said. You got the data for the first article. Go to where you got that and get more. Right?
March 4th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
In the more dense population centers you don’t really see foreclosures as much.
Can you show us your data on foreclosure rates by population density? Thanks.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Don basically made my point about California counties, at least in regard to San Bernardino and Riverside (although I’d like to know about the older parts vs. the newer subdivisions), but remember also that Palo Alto and Gilroy, and all parts in between are in Santa Clara county, so that may also be a little misleading.
Many years ago when I was a kid our congresscritter in South Palo Alto was a Republican from a completely rural Gilroy named Charlie Gubser. Guess we’ve seen a few demographic shifts in one lifetime.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Another point: the county variance map reports foreclosure rates as a percentage of all housing units, that is, including rental properties. Some commenters suggest that this makes foreclosures a suburban problem… Really? Are there an equal number of rental and owner-occupied housing units in suburban and urban counties? Again, just an incredibly misleading set of maps.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I’ve seen areas of Atlanta that were affected by the foreclosure neutron bomb, and it really is focused on the exurbiest of exurbs, places that were farmland not long ago and are still interspersed with rural pockets — the places where white people move, to be frank, in order to get even further away from black people.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
The real Steve Sailer:
Could you please have a lawyer write ThinkProgress telling them you’re considering suing the person leaving fake comments and asking them to preserve their electronic records? Then, please do sue and let us know who the mystery person is, and who they’re associated with.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
I think it is more a matter of location: conveniently-located neighborhoods were likely to already be relatively well-developed and relatively expensive, and therefore less attractive to speculative developers catering to marginal homebuyers.
Right. People move to where they can afford to live. Thus, you’re going to find more financially stressed families in farther out places where housing is cheaper. And that means exurbs are ground zero for foreclosures much more so than desirable, close-in suburbs, where the price of admission is a lot higher, and tends to weed out the less affluent. Not that rich folks aren’t feeling the pain — their incomes will likely fall much more than their poorer cousins’ as a result of the economic crisis. Just not enough to typically result in loss of a home.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Here’s a brand new report by Lucy and Herlitz of the U. of Virginia that answer’s Matt’s questions:
http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=7838
March 4th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Lucy and Herlitz write:
Foreclosures in States and Metropolitan Areas: Patterns, Forecasts, and Pricing Toxic Assets
William H. Lucy and Jeff Herlitz
Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture, University of Virginia
National housing price declines and foreclosures have not been as severe as some analyses have indicated, and they are not as important as financial manipulations in bringing on the global recession. Most foreclosures have been concentrated in California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, and a modest number of metropolitan counties in other states. In fact, 66 percent of potential housing losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, for a total of 87 percent of national declines in these four states.”
March 4th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I think the best way to interpret their figure of 66% in California alone is to say that 66% of all home value appreciation in the United States from 2000 to 2006 happened in the state of California. The other three Sand States accounted for another 21%, so the four Sand States accounted for 87% of the Housing Bubble in dollar terms.
If you make the assumption that home prices will go back to 2000 levels all across the country, then, likewise, 7/8ths of the loss in home values will occur in the four Sand States. That’s a big assumption, but it’s not all that implausible.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
More from Lucy and Herlitz:
“California had only 10 percent of the nation’s housing units, but it had 34 percent of the foreclosures in 2008. California was vulnerable to foreclosures, because the median value of owner-occupied housing in 2007 was 8.3 times median family income, while the 2007 national average was only 3.2, and in 2000 it was lower still at 2.4.”
They’re using RealtyTrac.com’s foreclosure statistics as of November 2008. So, these figures are primarily subprime mortgages getting foreclosed. The big wave of foreclosures in 2009 is likely to be Alt-A mortgages, which are starting to reset right now. (No more negative amortization). If the economic blues continue, we’ll probably see lots of prime fixed rate mortgages foreclose in 2010 or so.
So, their statement that foreclosure losses aren’t really that big is misleading since markets are already incorporating expectations of future defaults as the trouble spreads beyond subprime.
“Another vulnerability to foreclosures was seen in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where more than 20 percent of mortgage holders in each county were paying at least 50 percent of their income in housing related costs.”
“But even in California, enormous variations existed among jurisdictions, such as in the San Francisco metropolitan area, where Solano County had 3.69 percent of housing units in foreclosure in November 2008, while only 0.24 percent of housing units were in foreclosure in the City of San Francisco, a 15 to 1 difference.”
So far, the people hit hardest have typically been from the second quartile of society: blue collar and lower white collar folks. After all, it was the explicit goal of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations to raise the % of American households who own their own homes from the 64% level where it had been stuck for a couple of decades. So, the marginal homeowners had to come primarily from the second quartile. Unfortunately, they turned out to be very marginal, indeed.
Moreover, government policy wasn’t using the traditional policies to boost their earning power such as tariffs and immigration restriction. So, the big plan of both Clinton and Bush was that the second quartile should borrow more.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I’m definitely suing the imposter who posts as 24AheadDotCom. I’m going to sue him so hard, he’ll think he ate a bag of habañeros. In fact, I’m going to sue him so that he has to eat a bag of them, something his masters in the MexicanGovernment would force upon us all.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
DTM asks:
“Why will Obama’s program not just target places where the foreclosures are worst?”
Because there isn’t enough money in the world to bail out Californians who bought in 2004-2007. If the decline in American home values from 2006 is, say, $6 trillion, and if 66% of that is in California, that’s $4 trillion.
Granted, that overstates the mortgage problem in California since a lot of folks have paid off or nearly paid off homes. Still, they typical Californian who bought in 2005-2007 is now hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater. Moreover, they don’t earn anywhere near enough to pay off their mortgage: they were counting on appreciation.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Another crucial thing to keep in mind is that normally foreclosures and housing value declines get worse after a recession starts. In this case, though, the sequence of causality was reversed. Foreclosures and housing price falls in four American states set off the general economic downturn.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Pseudonymous in NC writes:
“I’ve seen areas of Atlanta that were affected by the foreclosure neutron bomb, and it really is focused on the exurbiest of exurbs, places that were farmland not long ago and are still interspersed with rural pockets — the places where white people move, to be frank, in order to get even further away from black people.”
In California, the worst foreclosure rates are generally seen in mixed-ethnicity exurbs, such as Lake Los Angeles (where there ain’t no lake, and their ain’t no Los Angeles within 70 miles). There just aren’t that many blue collar whites left in California, so the new buyers who bought during the bubble were typically a mixture of whites, Hispanics, some blacks, and the poorer sort of Asians, with Hispanics typically having a plurality of purchasers.
These hot, dusty, distant exurbs are where strivers hoping to keep their kids out of the underclass try to get into a halfway decent school district by buying more house than they can afford. Of course, easy credit just meant that more of the people they were trying to get away from bought next door, so their hopes of flipping the house to somebody for more money were forlorn because the Bubble drove down the quality of the school districts.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
The second tier in the Southern California foreclosure derby after the inland exurbs are older low rent suburbs, often where Hispanics are pushing blacks out. For example, Compton, the spiritual home of gangsta rap, but now heavily Hispanic. In 2007, a 500 square foot one bedroom pre-WWII house on a small lot in Compton sold for $340,000. (It’s now on the market for $69,900, a price that people who can’t afford to get straight outta Compton might actually be able to afford).
The upscale white/Asian suburbs of Southern California haven’t been hit hard by foreclosures yet, or even by falling prices. What’s happened is that nothing is selling in Santa Monica, because homebuyers there continue to profoundly believe that they just plain deserve seven figures for their 900 square foot house. Would-be buyers disagree, however. So, there’s trouble ahead.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Anyone know who Craig Hood is, or know whether Allegro Medical has multiple employees? Does Craig Hood have any assets?
March 4th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The crucial thing to note is that the kind of lending abuses that exacerbated the Housing Bubble (e.g., zero down payment first home purchases in California went from 7% in 1999 to 41% in 2006; and the spread of stated income [i.e., fraudulent] mortgage applications) were repeatedly justified in public as necessary to allow minorities to get their fair share of the American Dream.
If you compare the housing policy speeches of George W. Bush and Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo in 2002-2004, you can see that they are almost identical in content and tone.
Here’s part of Bush’s speech at his October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Minority Homeownership:
“Two-thirds of all Americans own their homes, yet we have a problem here in America because few than half of the Hispanics and half the African Americans own the home. That’s a homeownership gap. It’s a — it’s a gap that we’ve got to work together to close for the good of our country, for the sake of a more hopeful future. We’ve got to work to knock down the barriers that have created a homeownership gap.
“I set an ambitious goal. It’s one that I believe we can achieve. It’s a clear goal, that by the end of this decade we’ll increase the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families. (Applause.)
“Some may think that’s a stretch. I don’t think it is. I think it is realistic. I know we’re going to have to work together to achieve it. But when we do our communities will be stronger and so will our economy. Achieving the goal is going to require some good policies out of Washington. And it’s going to require a strong commitment from those of you involved in the housing industry.
“Just by showing up at the conference, you show your commitment. And together, together we will work over the next decade to enable millions of our fellow Americans to own a piece of their own property, and that’s their home.
“I appreciate so very much the home owners who are with us today, the Arias family, newly arrived from Peru. They live in Baltimore. Thanks to the Association of Real Estate Brokers, the help of some good folks in Baltimore, they figured out how to purchase their own home. Imagine to be coming to our country without a home, with a simple dream. And now they’re on stage here at this conference being one of the new home owners in the greatest land on the face of the Earth. I appreciate the Arias family coming. (Applause.)…
“To open up the doors of homeownership there are some barriers, and I want to talk about four that need to be overcome. First, down payments. A lot of folks can’t make a down payment. They may be qualified. They may desire to buy a home, but they don’t have the money to make a down payment. I think if you were to talk to a lot of families that are desirous to have a home, they would tell you that the down payment is the hurdle that they can’t cross.”
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/11/20/bushs-zero-down-payment-mural/
March 4th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Similarly, Angelo Mozilo, the now-notorious salesman who turned Countrywide’s boiler room operation into the biggest mortgage originator in the U.S., exploited modern America’s Pavlovian reaction to endorsements of diversity to push for more freedom for his predatory lending operation using almost exactly the same talking points as Bush, just more eloquently. In his Feb. 2003 address to the Harvard Joint Housing Studies Conference:
“Lower interest rates, the push for greater diversity in homeownership, and massive immigration into the U.S. have created both challenges and opportunities. However, despite the fact that approximately $2.5 trillion in mortgage loans were made in 2002, the gap between low income and minority homeownership, and what is classified as white homeownership, remains intolerably too wide. Therefore, expanding the American Dream of Homeownership must continue to be our mission, not solely for the purpose of benefiting corporate America, but more importantly, to make our Country a better place.
“… The overall U.S. homeownership rate, which was at 44 percent in 1940, hit 68 percent by the end of the third quarter of 2002. Historically low interest rates along with new, creative and flexible underwriting techniques are continuing to fuel a record period of growth for our industry. …
“While the number of minority homeowners has advanced recently, climbing from 9.5 million in 1994 to 13.3 million in 2001 – an increase of 40 percent – the fact remains that it is still not at a level equal to that of white homeownership. And as President Bush pointed out, the homeownership rate for African Americans is 47 percent and for Hispanic Americans it is 48 percent, a stark contrast to the homeownership rate of 75 percent for white American households. That means there is currently a homeownership gap of over 25 points when comparing white households with African Americans and Hispanics. My friends, that gap is obviously far too wide. It has been far too wide for far too long. And when adding new factors into the equation – like an influx of new immigrants or continued reduction in the supply of affordable housing – it has the potential to become far worse.
“So tonight, I want to discuss why that gap persists and how Countrywide is trying to address it. … If we don’t get a better handle on these issues, as I will discuss, I would argue that the homeownership gap will not only remain, but there is a good chance it will widen and the homeownership rates among low income and minority borrowers will continue to be depressed. …
“One of the more obvious resolutions to the Money Gap is the elimination of down payment requirements for low-income and minority borrowers. …
“Equally important, we must reduce the documentation required to make any and all loans; we should be able to approve loans in minutes, rather than days [i.e., don't check up on stated income figures on the application], and close loans in days, rather than weeks.
“… Although it may not be the issue it once was, discrimination still exists. And make no mistake – it has an impact on the homeownership rate of minority families. Therefore, it is critical that our governments must work to solve the issues of restrictive regulations, fees, codes and land use. …
“Just over ten years ago, we launched our formal affordable lending program called House America. Our hope was that with flexible underwriting guidelines, we would enable more people to qualify for home loans, and by having fewer credit and employment constraints, more families would achieve their American Dream. Back in 1992, we started with a $1.25 billion commitment to House America. In 2001, as part of our House America campaign to provide residential financing in under-served [i.e., minority] communities, we increased our commitment to $100 billion with a goal of obtaining that objective by 2005. I’m proud to say that in just 22 months, and not five years as originally planned, we have reached that goal.
“So I’d like to use this forum this evening to say that Countrywide is once again re-dedicating itself to expanding the dream of homeownership. Tonight, I am announcing the extension and expansion of our current 5-year, $100 billion challenge through the year 2010, with the commitment to fund a total of $600 billion in home loans for previously underserved Americans in this decade.”
By the way, this is a very common phenomenon — When a predatory lender gets accused of making too many loans to people who can’t possibly pay them back, he wins political influence and avoids a regulatory crackdown by promising to make even _more_ loans to minorities.
After all, the Community Reinvestment Act and the vast superstructure of Community Organizers who make their living off it say that the real problem is not enough lending to minorities.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
So, mortgage dollars for home purchases going to Hispanics went up a jaw-dropping 691% from 1999 to 2006, according to the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.
But it just wasn’t politically correct to point out that a lot of this was predatory lending by people like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide and Roland Arnall of Ameriquest. Who would dare go public to say that Hispanics just don’t, on average, have the kind of human capital to earn enough to pay back these huge mortgages they were getting in California? Who would dare say that it’s foolish to imagine home values will continue to rise in Hispanicizing exurbs because Hispanicization frequently means falling test scores in the local public schools and rather tacky looking streets.
Moreover, when credit standards and regulations were cut with the rationalization of giving minorities their fair share of the American Dream, they were cut for everybody, so lots of whites also got way in over their heads. We would have been better off with explicit quotas of dubious mortgages for minorities rather than cutting standards for everybody.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
One amusing sidelight is that Obama chose to go to Arizona to announce his mortgage bailout plan. The political logic seems plain: One Sand State, California, is already safely Blue, and bailing out homeowners could turn the three purple Sand States, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, Blue too.
The problem is that Obama didn’t realize that his plan, at least as originally conceived, wouldn’t do squat for Arizonans or other Sand Staters. The worst case scenario in Obama’s announcement was a family that bought in 2006 and was now $25k underwater. By Sand State standards, they would be Prudent Citizens of the Year.
No, the irony is that there’s only enough money to bail out homeowners in interior Red States with low land prices like Oklahoma. I suspect that Geithner and Summers hadn’t felt like mentioning that to Obama and the rest of his staff is too innumerate to figure it out for themselves.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I hate to interrupt Steve Sailer’s monologue, but I happen to live in one of those ’sand states’, California. Aside from the fact that most of the state probably wouldn’t identify with the term, and those of us along the coast probably would be thinking of a different kind of sand, I live in one of those close-in suburbs, not far from the Compton house he cited, but much more racially mixed – a former all-white blue collar community that is now much more diverse. It’s not a place that people strive for – the houses are smallish, most are over 50 years old, but have been kept up well. It’s very safe, has reasonably good schools, and very family oriented. Yes, our home values have declined, but I have only seen a small handful of foreclosures or ‘bank owned’ sales. Most people here bought what they could actually afford, and we seem to be weathering the storm pretty well. So not all of California is falling apart.
In contrast, I spent some time during the election in Las Vegas doing GOTV for Obama’s campaign. I was assigned to some of the newer subdivisions on the east side of town – some sort of McMansion-ish looking developments. In those new, not-yet-established neighborhoods, I saw 2 -3 foreclosures and bank sales per BLOCK. And many of the remaining houses had 2 – 3 families living in them. It was sad. The moral to this story? To quote Matt, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but it sure seems like a better idea to settle in an established, not-flashy neighborhood. Or maybe I’m just justifying my fabulousness deficiency, always a tough thing for a Southern Californian.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Torrance?
March 4th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
That’s what I said — the people who have got hit the hardest from foreclosures are typically from the second quartile up from the bottom. They never had the money to buy into a “close-in” suburb to LA that is “very safe, has reasonably good schools, and very family oriented.”
To take Torrance as an example of a non-flashy close-in suburb of LA with reasonably good schools (28% of Torrance’s population is Asian), the median price in January 2009 for Torrance’s typically small, cheaply built post-WWII houses was either $450k or $475k depending upon source. And Torrance was over $600k not long ago.
You’d probably need to be in the top 15% or so of America’s income distribution to be able to actually afford a small house in a place like Torrance. The upper middle class hasn’t gotten hit all that hard yet by foreclosures. It’s marginal class of people striving to keep their kids out of the underclass by buying more home than they could afford in a half decent exurban school distract that have been hit the hardest.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
What Sailer leaves out of his analysis is the extent to which this was driven not by owner-occupants but by “investors”, AKA speculators who bought houses expecting to flip them and are now just walking away. I don’t have the numbers but it wouldn’t surprise me if a large fraction of the foreclosures involved exactly that. (And by the way, the mortgages themselves are not a good source for establishing who was really an owner occupant– as with everything else many house flippers simply lied about this too in order to get better mortgage and insurance rates.) House flipping was not a lower middle class passtime– it was mainly people who had a little capital to start with who got into this big time. Older middle class people approaching retirement, and some upper middle class types with too much time on their hands and frustrated with other investment returns.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Speculating was a big part of the Housing Bubble. It was easy to be a speculator and get a second or third house with zero downpayment negatively amortizing mortgages.
Speculating could be particularly destructive of a neighborhood’s housing values. Owner-occupiers generally do a better job of keeping up their properties than renters. When speculators would run into snags that kept them from flipping as fast they had planned, cash flow problems could lead them to renting out to HUD Section 8 tenants relocated from torn-down public housing projects (remember Hanna Rozin’s Atlantic article on how Section 8 exports crime to the ‘burbs?) or to a half dozen illegal alien construction workers who were building the next exurban development farther out.
Pretty soon … there goes the neighborhood. And so everybody who can get out flees to the next development, where the same process happens all over again.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
In summary, what we see is that even people who follow the news professionally didn’t know the basic facts about the Mortgage Meltdown, such as where it primarily happened. Understanding fully why it happened will take a lot more work, but will reveal much about modern America.
March 5th, 2009 at 2:21 am
The other point to keep in mind about why foreclosures are so common in new exurbs is that, almost by definition, everybody in a brand new development has a mortgage. And if your development in Riverside County didn’t open until 2005, everybody in it bought in at the peak of the Bubble.
In contrast, there are people living in houses in San Francisco that have been paid off since great-great-great-grandfather cornered the sasparilla market in 1859. Not surprisingly, the foreclosure rate is much lower there.
(Of course, you can get foreclosed on your home equity loan even if you are a trustfunder.)
But that doesn’t explain why the majority of the Housing Bubble/Bust has been a California phenomenon.
But at least now pundits are slowly starting to learn the basic facts about the Mortgage Meltdown.
March 5th, 2009 at 9:29 am
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March 5th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
The county map is much better. I looked at the state map and thought, what is up with Mormons and foreclosures?