subject: Looking At How California Foreclosures Can Be Dealt With By Calfornian Leadership [print this page] California foreclosures and how California leadership may deal with them is an important issue. Understanding just how the Golden State found itself dealing with such a large problem in the first place and how it began to experience this problem years before the rest of the country did is an interesting problem. Some of the issue deals with rampant speculation while some of it also deals with a failure of state leadership, it needs to be said.
As it relates to the issue of CA foreclosures and how they increase or decrease (they've been increasing for the last few years), it's worth noting that California, Las Vegas, Florida and other areas all featured extremely vigorous real estate markets for a number of years. With the supply and demand model completely in favor of the seller prices for homes went up, sometimes unreasonably or unrealistically.
California political leadership -- just like leadership in most every other state -- encouraged this boom in real estate for a number of reasons, including that more people buying more homes meant increasing tax revenues. This encouraged the state and its municipalities to add sometimes-needed services, all on the expectation that the good times would continue to roll on forever. But no real estate boom has ever not been followed by a bust.
When it came to California, the beginnings of such a bust or drop in home prices probably started some time in 2006 though it's the case that home values were still soft in places like San Diego and elsewhere for about a year prior to that. However, lax lending standards and low-interest rate money kept people coming into the market for a few more years before it finally all began to decline.
And come to a head it did, starting mid-2007. By late 2008, the collapse of the financial markets put an official end to the irrational exuberance many economists and housing experts saw taking place in California real estate, and the real rises in the rate of CA foreclosures began to occur. At present, six cities in the Golden State are sitting in the top 10 cities across the country in terms of foreclosures.
State leaders have been trying to do certain things aimed at reducing the rate of CA foreclosures over time. They've been working with the federal government to get the word out (and to administer) certain programs that home owners can take advantage of to reduce their mortgages, for one. Also, the state has a law on the books (due to expire in 2011) that has added additional time to the foreclosure process.
It's hoped that loan modification and the extension of time (by 90 days) in the foreclosure timeline may encourage more homeowners to try to hold onto their properties, though the fact is median home prices in the Golden State have declined by 30 to 50 percent or more in many areas of the state. For those with homes worth far less than they owe, foreclosure seems to be an increasingly-common first resort, even.
Whether anything to do with the rate of CA foreclosures will ever be truly amenable to anything other than the natural corrections that market forces seem to impose as a matter of course is a question for the ages. Some think that the Golden State's foreclosure rate may even be stabilizing and could even be dropping. Time will tell on that forecast, it seems.
