Today, while preparing some information for our tax guy, I was asked what the value of our rental property in the states was. I hadn’t looked in a while so I took a quick trip over to Zillow. What I found there blew my mind.
First, the location. The house is in Sacramento, CA. Sacramento is not the rust belt. It’s a government town which, in theory, offers pretty stable employment. It was also a mini silicon valley with several high-tech employers offering high paying jobs. Apparently that’s no longer true. When I happened to glance at the zillow map which defaulted to a radius of a few blocks, every single house which was for sale or potentially for sale was in foreclosure or pre-foreclosure. Yes, you read that right. There were 7 houses and not one of them was for sale outside of some state of foreclosure.
So I started digging. When I zoomed out to span an area with a roughly 2 mile radius, here’s what I found:
Status of available houses
Type of sale |
Number |
Percent |
For Sale by agent, owner, new construction |
866 |
46% |
Foreclosure & Preforeclosure |
1013 |
54% |
So in what used to be a nice, stable neighborhood in a reasonably prosperous city we now have more homes in some state of foreclosure than there are for sale. I have never seen anything like that before (not that I’ve looked in the last few years). This is the “recovery” that Obama has brought us. This is what neoliberal policies look like on the ground. And this is one of the ways I count him as lying to me. His speeches about jobs and the economy certainly do not reflect the grim reality I just observed.
Even worse, things are set to get much, much worse as we go for round 2 of the Wall Street crash. I can’t imagine how many additional people are going to be financially devastated.
And you know what really frosts me about this? In the end, the same people who engineered this whole disaster are the ones who end up with the property. So they got the profits from their gambling spree. They got a taxpayer bailout.. and are still getting it. They got immunity from prosecution. And on top of it all they get the real estate.
This is obscene. So the next time one of you wants to tout how wonderfully Obama has handled the recovery, spare me. And insofar as Hillary, she can wrap herself in Obama all she wants. I don’t count that as a good thing.
This is why we need Bernie.
Friday, Feb 5, 2016 · 9:23:05 PM +00:00
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Snapple
From the comments section, icemilkcoffee brings up counter statistics that suggest I either wasn’t tracking the program back in 2006 or there’s something going on in the specific Sacramento neighborhood I lived in.
In the Sacramento region, about 7,000 properties received foreclosure filings in 2015; down 11 percent from the previous year. Blomquist says the rate of all housing units with a foreclosure filing was 0.81 percent.
"That is right on par with what we saw back in 2006, it was 0.82 percent," says Blomquist. "So we're really right at where we were in Sacramento in 2006 before the crisis hit and back to what I would consider normal housing levels."
This makes me wonder what the heck is going on. Is zillow wrong? Am I interpreting the numbers incorrectly? What is “pre-forclosure”? From Zillow, most of these foreclosures and preforeclosures are not listed in MLS.
If anyone experienced in this can untangle it, the zip in question is 95826.