Posted on 01/27/2008 5:03:23 PM PST by traumer
The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.
This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.
Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.
A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.
Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.
The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.
At 9422 Chagrin Street, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: "Please Used."
After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments.
It is a complicated story. She refinanced in 2003, but did not realize the document she signed included provisions to radically increase the interest rate.
She stopped making payments in 2006 and shows her unpaid bills totaling 24,000 dollars.
Her bank is in the midst of eviction procedures.
"When folks buy a home they expect to die in it, I guess," she said as she stood outside in the cold. "I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare."
Her words are echoed by the angry barks of the guard dogs pacing behind a chain link fence two houses away that was installed by the new owner: a bank.
The massive parking lot of the Eagle Fresh supermarket is empty.
Behind her till, Myra Bibldwit lifts her head when a bell signals the entrance of a customer.
"Not many folks come anymore. We're used to it," said the 24-year-old cashier, one of the few in the neighborhood who managed to hold onto her job.
In the five hours since she started working today she has served just 10 customers. "Maybe you will buy something," she says with a smile.
Then comes customer number 12.
Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street -- about 10 minutes away by car -- was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.
"Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes," she told AFP.
"I'm very upset. I missed my friend Helen. She disappeared overnight. She did not even say goodbye."
There are plenty of cases like Helen. They are called the neighbors who disappear in the night.
For county treasurer Jim Rokakis, the greed of the banks is to blame for this man-made disaster.
"All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer's incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless," he said in an interview.
"Shaker Heights was the perfect storm: poor folks, unemployed and a desire to get a piece of the American Dream."
See that the FEDS are getting ready to bail out the sub-prime/housing mess.
FHA loan limits to over $600K...coming soon to a mortgage lender near you! LOL!
Well I think that’s Fannie and Freddie going to 600k+ ...not sure what they’re doing with FHA. Either way it’s better than Hillary’s proposal, FWIW...the “30-day foreclosure freeze” she is considering.
Real Estate...in many pockets around the country is just not affordable...for the average household income to support.
Along comes the FEDS, with an instrument (FHA-government backed loans) to entice the lenders to loosen the mortgage money.
BTW...MIP insurance has to be pretty expensive on a $600K loan. ;^)
Also, guess they will increase the LTV to 125%...for just refi's...in order to help some of these borrowers currently 'upside down' on the mortgages.
Ok. I knew they were going up, but I wasn’t sure how much. I don’t do FHA at this firm - but we will be in March. Not sure about the LTV thing though...LOL...
For MIP insurance, if they use the same “formula” they always have for FHA, it will be about $300 a month on $600k.
ROFL
Rusty: "Do you think these guys know The Commodores?"
Looks like a nice town from Google Earth.
looks to me like alot of big homes on nice leafy streets. (But thats from above)
for some reason Chagrin St did not come up in goog earth, only Chagrin Blvd.
Here's a free clue:
Don't ever, ever sign a legal document you have not read or do not understand!
That movie is too politically incorrect to fly nowadays...but it’s a CLASSIC!
In my area that's armed robbery for a townhome.
I used to live 15-20 minutes from Shaker Hts. There is no “9422 Chagrin Street” and never was. What other crap did the author of this atricle make up?
Anything under 200k here is either:
-A condo so small you could stand at the front door and take a piss out the back window
or
-In a horrible neighborhood that you don’t walk around in the daytime unarmed in
Doesn’t to me.....
The vast majority of crime is committed by the same small subset of people, regardless of what community you are in. When you have a vaccuum like this, they fill it quickly.
Takes only a couple of handfulls of folks like this to devastate a community.
You can have a nice calm place with 2000 residence and very little crime.... you can have the same neighborhood only have 200 people and have the crime rate go up 1000%.
That dude could have appealed to the auditor. If you can prove the true market value is is really $54k, they may reduce the tax. If there are a lot of low price sales that are not due to foreclosure or failure to pay taxes, you stand a better chance.
wow....certainly NOT the Shaker Heights I knew.
“All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer’s incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless,” he said in an interview.
And no Social Security number either. Wonder how many who “left in the night” have already purchased a new identity/number and how many squatters will be purchasing the same.
Anything under $200K in my neck of the woods means sleeping with Rats and chasing crackheads out of your doorway.
Thanks zillow.com is one useful site!
Nice work! Weird that such an easily refutable story would be published. People really don’t read newspapers anymore!
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