Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?

Posted on September 3rd, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Mortgage News.

Over the last 18 months, the Egglestons have watched one house after another on their street, Gardenview Drive, end up foreclosed and vacant. Although lawns are still tidy and empty homes are not boarded up and stripped as they are in inner-city Cleveland, the Egglestons say Maple Heights no longer feels safe after dark. Nor do they have the confidence they had when they moved in a decade ago that this is the ideal place to raise their 6-year-old twin girls, Sydney and Shelby. So, in May 2006, they put their home on the market in order to move closer to Mrs. Eggleston’s parents in another middle-class Cleveland suburb, Richmond Heights.



Analysts also say that the fallout from mortgages gone bad is spreading well beyond borrowers now in default. It has begun to engulf middle-class communities like Maple Heights, where nearly 10 percent of the houses — or 910 properties — have been seized by banks in the last two years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/business/yourmoney/02village.html?_r=1&ref=yourmoney&oref=slogin

0 comments.

Leave a comment

Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are required (emails aren't displayed), url's are optional.