Anyway, back to the maps, here’s a heat map of Boston neighborhoods by income (Red means high income, blue means low):
OK, so what do you think the foreclosure heat map looks like? If you said nearly the opposite, you’re right. (Here the red means high rates of foreclosures and blue means relatively few foreclosures).
You can follow the link here, and get the same result on nearly every metro area in the country, save those like Miami where it’s bad everywhere. So what, then?
One this isn’t terribly surprising, but it should give us pause when exceptional anecdotes are trotted out in the press as ‘trends’ about wealthy foreclosures.
Additionally, it shows a particular need to pass one of Barney Franks’ measures to provide aid to communities dealing with the aftermath of foreclosure, which tends to be increases in blight and crimein communities that can ill afford it. As well as the need to view the housing crisis through these lenses; for the most part, it’s not the wealthy, the developers or the mortgage brokers getting burned on this.
Cross Posted at Mass Eyes and Ears
Look at Lawrence and Lowell…ouch.
<
p>Yes, definitely the places that ill afford the blight.
<
p>The fallout for our communities will be a long one.
I am concerned about Lawrence and Lynn especially, as cities they don’t have the resources to deal the magnitude of the problem on their own.
I think that you have a couple of factors here:
<
p>1) Bankruptcy Bill of 2005, pushed hard by the credit card branches of major banks, make it more difficult to walk away from credit card balances.
<
p>2) Debt forgiveness tax relief. This is a noble gesture, as before 2007 if you were foreclosed and walked away from a loan, you had a tax bill due to you on the amount of debt written off. Now you don’t have that penalty.
<
p>Why do these things matter? Relaxed lending standards allowed folks with little or no down payment into the market. If you are in economic distress, you have no equity (or negative equity now that prices have fallen), two factors above point a blinding arrow towards throwing the keys at your banker as you drive off in the Uhaul.
But one would never know it too listen to the media, where stories like the one I link too about a foreclosure in Greenwich CT predominate as well as ‘walkaway’ stories. Those , of course, aren’t norm.