Some Good News Regarding Chicago Housing Foreclosures
November 13th, 2009 categories: Chicago Info/News, Chicago News, Economic Recovery, For Homeowners, Foreclosures, Housing Market, Mortgage Info
Housing foreclosures in Chicago and across the nation have been rising steadily ever since the real estate slump began. This, of course, is not good: Foreclosures help no one. It’s a nightmarish experience for homeowners, but banks and lenders don’t want all of these foreclosed homes either. And foreclosures drag down the property values in the neighborhoods surrounding them, hurting every homeowner in the area.
That’s why the news from the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute was so welcome: The organization reported that housing foreclosures in the city of Chicago fell 9.6 percent in the third quarter of this year when compared to the same time period one year earlier.
These numbers buck the trend in the rest of the state. The six-county Chicago region, which, of course, includes the nearby Chicago suburbs, saw housing foreclosures rise 18 percent in the third quarter.
The numbers might cause people to look at foreclosure differently. We’re used to thinking of housing foreclosures as a city problem. We automatically think that homeowners in the inner city are the ones most in danger of losing their homes.
The Woodstock Institute numbers, though, tell a different tale. This time, foreclosures are spreading to the middle- and even upper-end homeowners of the suburbs. For instance, in Lake County, home to such wealthy suburbs as Lake Forest and Highland Park, housing foreclosures were up nearly 83 percent from a year earlier. In west suburban Kane County, home to the wealthy suburb of Geneva, housing foreclosures were up 96.6 percent.
To be fair, these counties still have far fewer housing foreclosures than does Cook County, so their sample size is far smaller. But the trends can’t be ignored: Housing foreclosure is a serious issue for all homeowners, no matter how ritzy a neighborhood in which they live. It’s why the federal government’s loan modification program, the Making Home Affordable program, is so important. It gives qualifying homeowners the chance to modify their existing home loans so that they can more easily make their mortgage payments. You can learn more about the program here.
We should support anything that reduces the number of foreclosures. According to the government’s latest statistics, about 5,000 loan modifications were in progress as of Oct. 8.
If you don’t think foreclosure is a problem that you’ll ever have to worry about, think again: You never know when you or your neighbor might suddenly have trouble paying the mortgage.
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This is good news that the number of housing foreclosures has decreased. But for the overwhelming majority of homeowners the real implementation of the federal government’s loan modification program is more important than the statistics.