It’s bad enough that foreclosures are up 75% compared to last year, and the trend is still moving upward! The ramifications of the sub-prime meltdown as it affects the housing market - especially the rental market - are barely being discussed! Hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their homes through foreclosure, which is a national tragedy in itself; however the effects to America’s rental market are staggering and is causing even more financial problems among our poor and lower middle-class citizens.
Foreclosures up 75% in 2007Defaults are way up for the year, with once red-hot Sun-Belt markets reporting the worst losses.
By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com staff writer
January 29 2008: 10:41 AM EST* Home price drop is biggest ever
* Foreclosures up 75% in 2007
* Foreclosures spike - and will get much worse
* New home sales: Biggest drop everNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of foreclosures soared in 2007, with 405,000 households losing their home, according to a report released Tuesday. That’s up 51 percent from the 268,532 homes that were repossessed in 2006.
Total foreclosure filings soared 97% in December alone compared with December of 2006, according to RealtyTrac, an online seller of foreclosure properties. For the year, total filings - which include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions - grew 75%.
More than 1 percent of all U.S. households were in some stage of foreclosure during 2007, up from 0.58 percent the year before.
“There are parts of the country where we’re seeing many more bank repossessions,” said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac. “People are flat out losing their homes.” MUCH MORE
Has anyone thought about where hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been kicked-out of their homes are living after going through the foreclosure process? Straight into inflated rental properties, which are becoming harder and harder to find! American landlords are finding they can ask ridiculous prices for rental properties, some which are higher than what they were paying on their now foreclosed mortgages - but I suppose that’s one of the many benefits of capitalism (sic). The moment there’s blood in the water, leave it up to good old capitalism to wreck even further havoc on those who have already lost most of what they owned.
Homes that are in foreclosure are not available to be placed on the rental market until they have been properly auctioned-off and repurchased, a process that often takes in excess of a year or more to accomplish. Hundreds of thousands of homes are being taken off the housing markets because of the sub-prime meltdown, rental property is going up in price, and now another crisis is hitting the US hard - and there’s not a commentator anywhere talking about the reality that the sub-prime meltdown is actually causing throughout the United States. New homes sales are sluggish, property values are down and expected to drop even more, so ask yourselves, where are all of these people going?
What about those who are on a fixed-income and have to move because their budgets cannot compensate for higher fuel and food costs? Now that “disaster capitalism” is in full-force, one crisis we face is the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are losing their homes to foreclosure - but the untold crisis that is rapidly manifesting itself is the lack of affordable rental properties - both of which present US inhabitants who are struggling to make ends meet with going from bad to worse, and it could take years for this realigning of the housing market to level off!
Sorry folks - but the disaster that Bush and the GOP have brought upon this country is just starting! No amount of economic stimulus packages are going to solve the housing crisis anytime soon because of our antiquated repossession laws, and until supply and demand equal out, the number of homeless and people joining the ranks of poverty will increase exponentially; as the Bush administration is well aware, these catastrophic changes to our housing market will reach critical mass sometime late in 2008 or early 2009, just in time for the GOP to proclaim it’s all the fault of the Democrats as they beat a hasty retreat from office and any responsibility of the harm they have wrought upon America.
William Cormier
