Foreclosure Epicenter: Maple Heights, Ohio
It looks like Maple Heights, Ohio is the epicenter of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. This is according to a depressingly grim feature article in Sunday’s New York Times Business section, “Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?“ For homeowners, this scenario is like “Night of the Living Dead,” in which the bloodthirsty zombies are the equivalent of property foreclosures and the last, surviving healthy folks are running for their lives before they get swallowed up, too.
Maple Heights is in the top one-half of 1 percent nationally in foreclosures, according to RealtyTrac, a company that tracks foreclosure data. To add insult to injury, Maple Heights is located in Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland) and 30 percent of sub-prime mortgages are late or in foreclosure. The family depicted on the cover of the paper is not threatened by foreclosure, but they just want to get out of a neighborhood that is slowly turning into a ghost town. The domino effect of foreclosures should be a 101 class in economics as this new school year starts. Here’s how one town of 27,000 people is being affected:
- The town’s two swimming pools were closed
- Police and firefighter jobs have been eliminated
- Free snowplowing for seniors has been cancelled
- Tax rolls are 15 percent below projections, forcing a 50 percent increase in garbage collection costs
This list might not sound like much now, but with a dwindling tax base, county-wide economic problems, an overabundance of homes for sale and dwindling home values, this is not a pretty picture. Want to avoid a similar situation? Check out a recent Wiki Wednesday post on avoiding foreclosures.
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