[traumer]

“I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare.”

[Tax-chick]

Sorry.

[RDTF]

wow

[Clintonfatigued]

Very sad.

[madison10]

Just for the record: Cleveland is in Ohio, not Illinois.

[Texas Eagle]

Does the (IL) mean Illinois?

[kalee]

Shaker Heights the Cleveland suburb is in OH not IL.

[kinoxi]

Tripled police, it’s a ‘ghost town’, but, the people are still leaving, smells funny to me.

[popdonnelly]

This was all very predictable. High risk loans result in foreclosures. It has always been thus. The FHA went through this same phenomenom 30+ years ago.

[vladimir998]

quote from the article:

“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.

Wait. I thought the banks were greedy? Here it sounds more like the people were just stupid. So why do we just blame the corporations? Why doesn’t anyone say, “These people did something stupid”?

[kinoxi]

They are called the neighbors who disappear in the night.

[reg45]

US mortgage crisis creates ghost town (IL)

The last I heard, Cleveland and Shaker Heights are in OH not IL.

Next time get your facts straight.

What do you think this is - The Daily KOS?

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

She refinanced in 2003, but did not realize the document she signed included provisions to radically increase the interest rate.

No point in reading and understanding a document that contains potentially life-altering consequences.

[Larry Lucido]

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.

So, the population is decreasing but they hire more cops? What are they going to do, write each other speeding tickets to raise revenue?

[hinckley buzzard]

This doesn't describe the Shaker Heights I know, a reasonably prosperous and stable long-established community. It must be a cherry-picked street or two up against the border of Cleveland proper.

[Texas Eagle]

Holy Frijoles. I did a zillow.com search for Chagrin St. in Shaker Heights, OH and they show an 8br, 2ba home for 186,000 dollars.

Who can't afford that?

[kidd]

Oh good grief.

Are we led to believe that an entire town took on loans they couldn’t afford?

Th truth is that the town has been in decline for decades, as has most of the Cleveland area.

What’s next? A picture essay on how the “mortgage crisis” has destroyed Detroit?

[Hot Tabasco]

She stopped making payments in 2006 and shows her unpaid bills totaling 24,000 dollars.

Sounds like she stopped making payments not only on her mortgage but also her electricity, her water, her swerage, her phone, her credit cards, and every other bill that was coming in........

30 years living in the same house and she re-mortgages? Wonder what she did with the cash............

There certainly is a heck of a lot more to this story than is being reported.......

[the invisib1e hand]

I know Clevelend is in Ohio, and I'm pretty sure shaker heights is one of the more affluent suburbs, and I don't think anyone has really relied on the steel industry for a long time...

maybe this ought to be posted under fiction.

[NoCountryForLiberals]

A friend sent me the URL for this article from BBC News that does seem to me to do a real good job of explaining the whole sub-prime mess and how it affects other investments and the broader economy. I'm no expert on this stuff and it helped me to get a better handle on this stuff. The US sub-prime crisis in graphics