California apparently leads the nation in home foreclosures, as I learned on NPR yesterday afternoon. Just out of curiosity, I looked up current foreclosures in Fort Bragg, and found 17 so-called “real estate owned” homes, meaning foreclosed homes which didn’t sell on the courthouse steps, suggesting that no one wants them, along with another 38 homes in the early stages of foreclosure, and six homes for sale by owners trying to get out before foreclosure. One of the REOs, I noted, was on my very block, and the bulk of the homes undergoing foreclosure had loans from Countrywide. Sometimes multiple loans.
Actually, the amount of information I was able to gather was rather…extensive. Apparently once your home is in foreclosure, it makes you fair game for the intertubes. Had I wanted to bother paying, I could have obtained a lot more info, but I just wasn’t that motivated. As it was, I was able to get loan histories and a wide assortment of other information with minimal effort, including home addresses of property owners.
The NPR story was discussing the impact of foreclosure on communities, which is something I’m not sure that everyone has been thinking about. Everyone feels bad for the poor abused wannabe homeowners thrown out of their homes because they bit off more house than they could chew and didn’t bother to read loan paperwork, but there’s more to foreclosure.
Renters, for example, typically get the shaft. If you rent a home which ends up being foreclosed, you can be out on the street with little to no warning, and, as we all know, it is really hard to find rentals on short notice, especially in California, and especially in the areas where foreclosures are skyrocketing. And how shitty is it to find yourself thrown out because your landlord wasn’t responsible enough to pay the mortgage? (It makes me think that when a home is foreclosed, renters should be offered the option of buying out the loan.)
It also screws municipalities, because when you aren’t paying your mortgage, you aren’t paying your property taxes. Looking up the property tax payments on my block (which is very easy, courtesy of the County Clerk’s office), I noted that our property taxes are current, which is not too surprising, and that the foreclosed home isn’t the only place in the neighborhood lagging on the property tax payments. When property taxes don’t get paid, the community at large suffers, because property taxes fund useful things, like schools and fire departments.
Furthermore, evidence seems to suggest that rising foreclosures also contribute to an increased rate of crime and urban blight, which makes sense when you view vacant homes as risk factors for that kind of thing. Slumburbs, as you might call them, are the result of, ahem, rampant overbuilding. Like, say, what the City of Fort Bragg is proposing for the Mill Site. The NPR reporter specifically mentioned new developments, talking about the fact that these brand new homes are sitting empty for extended periods of time…even when heavily discounted, and it makes me wonder why new developments are still going through.
Given that Fort Bragg has a quietly growing crime problem, I definitely think we need to up the ante with a colossal development of ugly houses. Just to really get things going. I mean, why think small? Go big or go home, I say.
After looking up foreclosure rates, I took a gander at homes for sale around the area, and noticed a very large, and very static inventory. I tend to keep an eye on houses for sale, because it’s a topic of interest for me, and I note that of the houses on the market a year ago…most of them are still on the market. And most of them have significantly lower asking prices, but those prices are still pretty ludicrous. Like an unlivable “in-town fixer” for $300,000, for example. And “bargain properties under $600,000!”
I pointed this out to a realtor recently, actually, and she seemed confident that these places would sell eventually. Which may be true…at a drastically reduced rate, or if the economy suddenly goes totally insane. She also admitted that she was carrying a larger inventory than ever before, and that homeowners were starting to back off on their asking prices, although they didn’t seem willing to consider prices which I think are reasonable yet.
It’s just funny to me that houses sit on the market with asking prices like two million, and they sit, and sit, and sit, while the rate of foreclosures is on the rise. No matter what you think your yuppie palace is worth, if it ain’t sellin’, it ain’t sellin’. Granted, two million dollar homes aren’t the kind of places that subprimers buy, but a lot of $600-800,000 homes are under foreclosure, for all their “bargain” prices. And what happens when you realize that the market value of your “investment property” has dropped below the price you paid for it?
My father and I were discussing this the other day, and he pointed out that one of the most troubling things about the real estate market is that people are under the impression that they can “own” land, trading it like a commodity, rather than treating it like a resource and a living organism. I view a home as a living space, not an investment, and that seems to be the fundamental difference between me and the people who buy property to flip it. Maybe if people thought of homes as homes and realistically assessed what they could afford, we wouldn’t be having a foreclosure crisis, or stratospherically high real estate prices.
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Foreclosing
California apparently leads the nation in home foreclosures, as I learned on NPR yesterday afternoon. Just out of curiosity, I looked up current foreclosures in Fort Bragg, and found 17 so-called “real estate owned” homes, meaning foreclosed homes which didn’t sell on the courthouse steps, suggesting that no one wants them, along with another 38 homes in the early stages of foreclosure, and six homes for sale by owners trying to get out before foreclosure. One of the REOs, I noted, was on my very block, and the bulk of the homes undergoing foreclosure had loans from Countrywide. Sometimes multiple loans.
Actually, the amount of information I was able to gather was rather…extensive. Apparently once your home is in foreclosure, it makes you fair game for the intertubes. Had I wanted to bother paying, I could have obtained a lot more info, but I just wasn’t that motivated. As it was, I was able to get loan histories and a wide assortment of other information with minimal effort, including home addresses of property owners.
The NPR story was discussing the impact of foreclosure on communities, which is something I’m not sure that everyone has been thinking about. Everyone feels bad for the poor abused wannabe homeowners thrown out of their homes because they bit off more house than they could chew and didn’t bother to read loan paperwork, but there’s more to foreclosure.
Renters, for example, typically get the shaft. If you rent a home which ends up being foreclosed, you can be out on the street with little to no warning, and, as we all know, it is really hard to find rentals on short notice, especially in California, and especially in the areas where foreclosures are skyrocketing. And how shitty is it to find yourself thrown out because your landlord wasn’t responsible enough to pay the mortgage? (It makes me think that when a home is foreclosed, renters should be offered the option of buying out the loan.)
It also screws municipalities, because when you aren’t paying your mortgage, you aren’t paying your property taxes. Looking up the property tax payments on my block (which is very easy, courtesy of the County Clerk’s office), I noted that our property taxes are current, which is not too surprising, and that the foreclosed home isn’t the only place in the neighborhood lagging on the property tax payments. When property taxes don’t get paid, the community at large suffers, because property taxes fund useful things, like schools and fire departments.
Furthermore, evidence seems to suggest that rising foreclosures also contribute to an increased rate of crime and urban blight, which makes sense when you view vacant homes as risk factors for that kind of thing. Slumburbs, as you might call them, are the result of, ahem, rampant overbuilding. Like, say, what the City of Fort Bragg is proposing for the Mill Site. The NPR reporter specifically mentioned new developments, talking about the fact that these brand new homes are sitting empty for extended periods of time…even when heavily discounted, and it makes me wonder why new developments are still going through.
Given that Fort Bragg has a quietly growing crime problem, I definitely think we need to up the ante with a colossal development of ugly houses. Just to really get things going. I mean, why think small? Go big or go home, I say.
After looking up foreclosure rates, I took a gander at homes for sale around the area, and noticed a very large, and very static inventory. I tend to keep an eye on houses for sale, because it’s a topic of interest for me, and I note that of the houses on the market a year ago…most of them are still on the market. And most of them have significantly lower asking prices, but those prices are still pretty ludicrous. Like an unlivable “in-town fixer” for $300,000, for example. And “bargain properties under $600,000!”
I pointed this out to a realtor recently, actually, and she seemed confident that these places would sell eventually. Which may be true…at a drastically reduced rate, or if the economy suddenly goes totally insane. She also admitted that she was carrying a larger inventory than ever before, and that homeowners were starting to back off on their asking prices, although they didn’t seem willing to consider prices which I think are reasonable yet.
It’s just funny to me that houses sit on the market with asking prices like two million, and they sit, and sit, and sit, while the rate of foreclosures is on the rise. No matter what you think your yuppie palace is worth, if it ain’t sellin’, it ain’t sellin’. Granted, two million dollar homes aren’t the kind of places that subprimers buy, but a lot of $600-800,000 homes are under foreclosure, for all their “bargain” prices. And what happens when you realize that the market value of your “investment property” has dropped below the price you paid for it?
My father and I were discussing this the other day, and he pointed out that one of the most troubling things about the real estate market is that people are under the impression that they can “own” land, trading it like a commodity, rather than treating it like a resource and a living organism. I view a home as a living space, not an investment, and that seems to be the fundamental difference between me and the people who buy property to flip it. Maybe if people thought of homes as homes and realistically assessed what they could afford, we wouldn’t be having a foreclosure crisis, or stratospherically high real estate prices.
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