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Foreclosures in North Carolina coming at record pace

Post on August 16, 2010 by 5 Comments »

The aftermath of the housing bubble’s burst continues to wreak havoc everywhere. In North Carolina, we’re on pace for a record year of foreclosures.

If current trends continue, we’ll hit 70,000 this year, shattering the previous record of 63,289 in 2009.

Through July 31, the following counties have been hit the hardest from a sheer numbers perspective:

Mecklenburg (6,726)
Wake (3,246)
Guilford (2,542)
Forsyth (1,449)
Union (1,179)
New Hanover (1,126)
Durham (1,109)
Buncombe (1,073)
Gaston (1,068)
Cumberland (961)

Population plays a role in these numbers. Many of our smaller counties are being hit even harder, relatively speaking. Only one North Carolina county — Warren — has already hit its 2009 level in 2010, with 70 foreclosures.

Nationally, foreclosures are expected to peak next year. That’s why it’s important to support the measures North Carolina state lawmakers have taken so far, and to encourage more efforts in that direction.

State legislators are to be applauded for passing Senate Bill 1015, the Homeowner and Homebuyer Protection Act, which will help people stay in their homes. This is also a good reason to preserve our Housing Finance Agency’s Home Protection Program and the NC Commissioner of Banks Foreclosure Prevention Project.

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Comments (Closed):5

  1. WILLIAM MURRAT
    August 16, 2010 at 12:42 pm

    Government regulators were asleep at the wheel, and now we all suffer the consequences. Same thing with the oil spill ! We had 18.000 employees and 100,000 contractors in the department of Energy, and no one did anything. I find that government does very few things well.

  2. Jeff Shaw
    August 16, 2010 at 2:50 pm

    The problem wasn’t government regulation, but the lack thereof.

    Years of radical deregulation created a climate of reckless casino-style gambling by finance companies, to the detriment of taxpayers’ pocketbooks. The result was a shortsighted cash grab that crushed equity for the middle class.

    We need more government oversight to make sure this doesn’t happen again, not less.

  3. WILLIAM MURRAT
    August 16, 2010 at 6:53 pm

    There were plenty of regulations, but no one smart enough to administer them.The Community Reinvestment Act started it all, and then Greenspan threw so much cash in the system it was impossible to stop.Ineptness in Fannie Mae.SEC, and Freddie Mac fueled the fire in addition to old fashioned greed on the part of bankers and Wall St. Unfortunately, you can’t regulate this type of behavior.

  4. Jeff Shaw
    August 16, 2010 at 7:45 pm

    The part about greed of Wall Street bankers is accurate. But even if you can’t regulate that motivation, you can craft regulation that moderates its most odious tendencies — which is why more regulation, not less, is the answer.

    That business about the Community Reinvestment Act is completely false. The act was passed in 1977, for one thing, so if it was responsible for the looser standards, the housing crisis should have happened a lot sooner than it actually did.

    Also,

    1. Only about 1 in 4 of the subprime loans came from banks that were subject to CRA;
    2. Most CRA activity had basically stopped by 2001,
    2. Bush dramatically weakened the law in 2004, and
    4. (This is critical) Banks subject to CRA made *fewer* dangerous loans compared to those that were not.

    (http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis)

    There’s a reason both FDIC and the Federal Reserve did studies that absolved the Community Reinvestment Act of responsibility. The story of blame just doesn’t make sense.

    It would be nice if the answer were just that regulators were not smart. Then we could just hire new regulators.

    The real answer is that a lot of very smart, very rich people consciously weakened regulations so they could make a lot more money off a lot of very vulnerable poor and middle class people — which is most of us. We’ve got to fix the system, not the people within it (although having smart and conscientious people enforcing the laws doesn’t ever hurt).

  5. Harry Connor Jr
    August 17, 2010 at 9:19 pm

    Great article. “We’ve got to fix the system, not the people within it (although having smart and conscientious people enforcing the laws doesn’t ever hurt).” I work in the tax deed arena, and this blog and the information it reveals is enlightening, and it reinvigorates my resolve to find a way to get around these fraudsters’ schemes through tax deed investing – designed to get myself and others out from under their “jackboots of debt”.