Foreclosures in New York: The Results are In

Mark Winston Griffith

Foreclosures in New York: The Results are In

For weeks now I've been talking to reporters and my colleagues about whether New York homeowners have been slipping into foreclosure at the same rate as mortgage borrowers from across the country. At the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP) we acquire and study foreclosure data, but until recently we had not received the most recent data from 2006 and 2007. While we've been collecting anectdotal evidence that an increasing number of homeowners in New York are falling prey to not only abusive mortgage products, but a range of predatroy real estate practices, we haven't had any confirmation. Surely, others have speculated, New York, with it's red hot housing market, must be immune to the scourge of foreclosures sweeping the land.

Wrong!

As recently reported in the Daily News by Juan Gonzalez, NEDAP has looked at the most recent foreclosure data and found that New York is indeed experiencing the same foreclosure epidemic as the rest of the country. (Listen to Juan and I discuss this with WNYC's Brian Lerher) Lis pendens filings - which are legal recordings of mortgages that are in default, indicating that a homeowner could ultimately lose his/her home in a foreclosure auction - have risen dramatically over the past year and a half. 2006 showed a 36% increase in lis pendens filings from the previous year. Perhaps most frighteningly, the number of lis pendens filings from January 1 through March 19 rose 48% compared to the some period the year before!

This is one of those moments where very little more explanation is necessary. The numbers speak for themselves. New York homeowners are suffering and it's time to stop the bleeding.

Comments

New York has a horrible way of handling their mortgage foreclosure proceedings; if a property is really desirable, the address won't be posted, no picture provided, contact information withheld or vague when you inquire. For example, although those properties may not all be foreclosures, look at Realtor.com and NY doesn't provide the information needed. A country all unto its own.

Actually this is not exactly compelling or clear.

This post fails to make its case in several ways...

The only statistics cited in this post are percent change from previous period. and while 36% and 48% are rather large numbers this assumes that the starting values were of significant size. Now maybe they were or maybe they were not, we don't know from this post.

More relevant statistics might be the actual number of mortgages going into default at different time periods, as well as a those numbers as a percentage of those are subprime, what percentage of subprime mortgages in nyc are going into default and what percentage of all mortgages are going into default. NYC is a big city, this post doesn't offer enough contextual perspective to support its claim that little more explanation is necessary.

Perhaps the information is in the sources you site, but even those sources are not easily accessible. The Juan Gonzalez reference points to a pdf. I don't know what the statistics are, but pdfs are a serious deterrent to reading. I know I didn't read it when my computer asked me if I wanted to open it, and I'm not that afraid of technology - but pdfs are the bane of the internet, and they are a bane to making your case here. Why not just quote the four or five relevant lines from the article? Why are you making me do the research to prove your point?

Likewise the link to the audio clip is self defeating. Here you expect me to listen through what? 10 minutes? a half hour? an hour? how long is the segment? How long do I have to listen before I learn the 3 critical data points that make your case? Not only that - you didn't actually link to THE audio stream - instead you linked to a page with several news stories on it. Which again is a deterrent - now I have to spend my time hunting around a page looking for what I thought I was already being linked to? Why didn't you at least just link right to the stream? It is right here: http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram?file=/bl/bl032807e.mp3

You may be right, the situation may be dire and it may be clear cut, but we don't know from this post.