Pondering On How California Foreclosures Could Be Dealt With By The State’s Leadership Class
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.
As far as California goes, this bust in real estate prices probably first began in a serious way in 2006 though San Diego and other cities began to feel a softening of the markets about a year before that. Still, easy lending and easy (meaning low interest rate) money kept people flocking to the market for a few more years before it all finally began to come down in a serious way.
That let down in the markets began to really take off in mid-2007. After the financial markets themselves finally went down badly in late 2008, the real estate market out in California ground to a halt. At that point, the rate of increase in CA foreclosures really took off, with the state now featuring six of the top 10 cities in the country in terms of foreclosure. That’s not an enviable record to hold, it must be said.
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.
California leaders hope that the combination of loan modification and lengthening of the foreclosure process may convince more home owners to try to stay in their homes. But with California home prices declined by 30% or even more, it’s the case that a lot of people are sitting in homes worth much less than they owe, meaning they are increasingly looking at foreclosure as the first choice rather than the last.
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.
Ca foreclosures are very real. If you are down about a Ca foreclosure, then there is useful tips out there, you just need to know where to search. The net is a great place to search.
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