The Rutland Herald reports from Vermont. “Lee Roberge already has trouble paying the monthly mortgage bills. When his adjustable-rate mortgage increases next year, the Cambridge resident will join the rising number of Vermont homeowners at risk of losing homes to foreclosure. ‘It could jump 1 percent or even 1-1/2 percent,’ Roberge said of his anticipated rate increase. ‘It’s just going to be another needle into me.’”
“Roberge’s situation mirrors that of many Vermonters. Unable to secure a traditional mortgage, the truck driver opted for an adjustable-rate mortgage, or ARM, to purchase his Cambridge home about four years ago. ‘My credit wasn’t good to begin with, so I couldn’t get a good 30-year fixed rate,’ he said.”
“Roberge is optimistic he’ll be able to keep his home, even if it means some lifestyle changes such as renting out a room in his house. ‘It’s like I can see a light at the end of the tunnel now,’ he said.”
The Concord Monitor from New Hampshire. “After a boom several years ago, the real estate market in Franklin has cooled. The trend is worrying real estate agents and potential sellers, especially as more foreclosures continue to soften the market.”
“‘It’s scary,’ said Doug Embree, owner of Twin Rivers Realty, with offices in Tilton and Laconia.” “In Franklin, 39 percent fewer homes, condominiums and multifamily buildings sold in the first 10 months of 2007, compared with 2005.”
“Locally, defaults have produced a spike in foreclosure listings, from 33 in the year ending Sept. 30, 2006, to 50 the next year. The past month and a has have seen at least nine foreclosures. Foreclosures deflate the market, said Embree, because banks auction off homes in a hurry to recoup as much of their investment as possible.”
“‘Now we have all these properties on the market that have been foreclosed upon,’ he said. ‘The seller has to compete with those.’”
“In 2005, when real estate prices peaked across the country, more houses were sold for higher prices than ever before, said David Liberatore, of The Masiello Group. Franklin was no exception.”
“At the same time, subprime lenders conducting business online targeted people with poor credit and little cash. Some mortgages came with interest rates as high as 16 percent, said Liberatore.”
“‘Three years ago, if somebody was breathing, they would get a loan,’ he said. ‘A lot of these people were not qualified to buy these homes, and they bought them anyway. So now they are having a tough time holding them.’”
“Real estate agents in the Franklin area said that a slowdown in the market could have its blessings, as well. ‘Hopefully, this recession will clean out a lot of the bad lenders,’ said Embree.”
“It may clean out a lot of inexperienced real estate agents, as well.”
“‘The market is not what it was like in 2005,’ said Liberatore, who said that most sellers in his area had lowered their prices by 10 percent to 15 percent. ‘You have a lot of agents that have only been in the market two or three years, and are very confused by what’s going on in the market right now.’”
“‘It’s not the norm for houses to go up 20 to 25 percent a year,’ said Liberatore. ‘It’s normal for houses to go up 3 to 5 percent a year.’”
The Boston Herald from Massachusetts. “The number of Massachusetts homes falling into foreclosure is topping a stunning 3,000 a month for the first time since the 1990s real estate bust, new figures show.”
“The Warren Group yesterday reported that lenders initiated foreclosure proceedings against 3,115 Bay State homes in August. That’s the highest monthly total since the 1990s downturn.”
“‘Foreclosures are getting so high that I worry they’re becoming like Mount Washington: Making their own weather,’ Warren said, theorizing that the state’s foreclosure crisis has become bad enough to hurt the overall housing market. ‘Potential buyers figure: ‘There must be lots of distressed properties around. Maybe we should wait to buy.’”
“All told, August filings rose 75.5 percent from year-earlier levels, as well as 25.3 percent from July 2007 - and problems show no signs of abating.”
The Boston Globe. “Foreclosure deeds, which are the final step in the foreclosure process, rose 143.8 percent in September from 276 in the same month a year ago to 673, but that number was a decline from August 2007 when the number of foreclosure deeds was 1,018.”
“‘It’s interesting that foreclosure deeds are falling off slightly, given the ever increasing number of petitions to foreclose we’ve been seeing,’ Warren said in a statement. ‘It could be that lenders are holding off on letting the ax fall.’”
“Warren added of lenders, ‘Or they could be heeding Governor Deval Patrick’s plea to slow down the process. Whatever the reason is, we can be sure more foreclosures are coming down the pike, as petitions don’t seem to be letting up.’”
“There were 3,115 petitions to foreclose filed in Land Court in August, the highest number of petitions filed in one month since the Warren Group began collecting foreclosure data in January 2005, the firm said.”
“Eight states including Massachusetts have pledged almost $900 million this year to help borrowers replace unaffordable mortgages, but the states collectively have refinanced fewer than 100 people, a Globe survey found.”
“A leading advocacy group said the programs simply aren’t able to help most borrowers. ‘They’re very well intentioned,’ said David Berenbaum of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, ‘but these new products aren’t fitting the needs of the consumers we see.’”
“The vast majority of the applicants aren’t eligible for refinancing. They have either fallen too far behind on their payments, have badly damaged credit, or simply owe more on their loans than the value of their homes, making refinancing effectively impossible.”
“In Massachusetts, more than 3,500 people have called seeking help, but only about 30 passed two stages of screening and were referred to lenders to begin the actual refinancing process. None have received a loan as yet.”
“The programs primarily were designed to help only a portion of the population with problem mortgages: those who can make their payments now, but are facing unaffordable rate increases.”
“‘It was a great program for somebody who was thinking ahead,’ said Tonna Phelps, director of Single Family Housing at the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. ‘The problem is that people aren’t thinking ahead, so now we have to go back to the drawing board.’”
“The stalled state efforts highlight the general difficulty of helping homeowners avoid foreclosure: Officials have only a short time frame to act before borrowers fall too far behind to be helped. Yet the circumstances of each loan are unique and complex - ‘Like snowflakes,’ said one official - making it is impossible to process cases routinely.”
“Moreover, lenders often must be persuaded to accept a financial loss to make the refinancing possible.”
“More than 6,200 properties were foreclosed in Massachusetts during the first 10 months of this year, according to data released yesterday by Warren Group. That is more than three times the number of foreclosures during the same period last year.”
From Metro New York. “The wave of foreclosures crashing over the rest of the country in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis hasn’t hit New York. Yet.”
“The foreclosure rate has remained fairly constant over the last few years, but housing Commissioner Shaun Donovan presented some sobering stats yesterday to the City Council. They showed a dramatic rise in pre-foreclosure filings.”
“‘We expect in the neighborhood of 14,000 [pre-]foreclosure filings in the five boroughs this year,’ Donovan said. That’s more than double the roughly 6,870 filings in 2004 and in 2005.”
“‘I think it’s likely we’ll see a jump in foreclosures next year,’ he said. ‘We do think the scale of this problem is really still growing.’”
The New York Magazine. “What the hell is happening in Red Hook? Ivy Pochoda remembers having that thought, and she remembers she wasn’t alone. It was about a year ago, Brooklyn was booming, a Fairway grocery store had just opened in Red Hook, and Pochoda was thinking about moving away.”
“She’d outrun gentrification for a while, but now it seemed to have caught up with her. ‘Red Hook was changing so quickly. ‘People were saying this is changing, that’s changing. They’re closing the Pioneer bar. The Fairway had opened. Ikea was coming. There was even a rumor they were opening a Marriott hotel,’ she said.”
“Gentrification in New York has gone from an implausible economic rejuvenation to an unstoppable social juggernaut to a widely held article of faith. We’ve come to assume, based on all available evidence, that we’re in the midst of a continuous viral cycle.”
“What if gentrification isn’t self-sustaining after all? What if, in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: a self-extinguishing phenomenon? What if it’s less a flood than a forest fire—wild, yes, out of control, absolutely, but destined to consume itself by burning through the fuel it needs to survive?”
“‘Frontier town’ and ‘Wild West’ and ‘run-down fishing village’ are all phrases you encounter again and again while talking to people in Red Hook. Ben Schneider, who runs the Good Fork with his wife, described falling in love with the neighborhood while visiting a friend several years ago.”
“‘I just loved this mix of light industry, quiet streets, and vacant lots,’ he said. I pointed out to him that ‘vacant lots’ is not an amenity you often hear counted as a neighborhood attraction. ‘It’s true,’ he said, then smiles. ‘It’s definitely not for everyone.’”
“Brokers and boosters like to describe Van Brunt as a ‘twenty-minute walk from the subway,’ but they don’t often tell you what this journey entails: From the Smith Street–Ninth Street F-train stop, you travel by foot over, under, and around the tangle of the BQE and the entrance to the Battery Tunnel, then cross an uninviting wasteland of warehouses and Dumpster-storage yards guarded by barbed wire and the occasional unfriendly dog.”
“The housing stock is in short supply, and what does come up for sale is unsightly or, in the blunt words of one resident, ’shit.’”
“Also, there’s a really bad termite problem. Oh, and the basements routinely flood. And the part of Red Hook that people talk about when they talk about gentrification…was once so rough that a local elementary school was renamed for Patrick Daly, a principal who was shot to death in 1992 by drug dealers in the projects.”
“If there’s such a thing as a New New New Red Hook, it’s embodied by Rachel Shapiro, a 23-year-old real-estate agent (she’s not yet a fully licensed broker).”
“As we left Shapiro’s storefront, a guy standing at her window was checking out the listings in the dollhouse while talking on his cell phone; he looked at one and sputtered, ‘That’s absurd!’”
“When I asked her about it, Shapiro just shrugged. ‘I have people come and say, ‘I want to list my house at $1.5 million, but I’m willing to accept $1 million,’ she says. ‘I’ll say, ‘Then you should list it at 1.1, not 1.5.’ But they say, ‘Let’s try it.’ Which is fine. I’m not in a position to turn down a listing. It just means I have people standing in front of my window saying that prices are absurd.’”
“‘A lot of developers in Red Hook have gotten ahead of themselves by charging gentrified prices without providing any of the services that gentrifiers expect,’ says Winifred Curran, a geography professor at DePaul. ‘People who can afford to spend a million dollars on an apartment want to be able to get to work in less than an hour and a half. They want a supermarket. They want a bank. And in my opinion, a lot of the redevelopment in Red Hook is not actually very nice.’”
