Eric S. Belsky

Cities Destroyed (Again) For Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis

In 2008, there will be at least 2.5 million new foreclosures in the United States. Record levels of mortgage delinquency, default, and foreclosure are causing widespread hardship in cities and suburbs across America, and causing repeated destabilization of global credit and investment markets. In this Forum, six housing specialists unravel the complex connections between urban geography, subprime lending, and foreclosure. Although a wide variety of view-points are represented, three common threads are evident. First, foreclosures are tightly linked to the lax underwriting standards and aggressive business practices of the subprime mortgage market. Second, the subprime-foreclosure linkage is a reflection of the steady deregulation of U.S. financial markets and the promotion of homeownership as the cornerstone of national housing policy. Third, deregulated mortgage market segmentation has created uneven new geographies of debt, risk, and default—superimposed atop existing landscapes of old-fashioned exclusionary discrimination. Low-income and racially marginalized neighborhoods, once redlined and excluded from mainstream credit markets, were at the center of the profitable wave of subprime abuse and equity extraction during the long housing boom, and are now at the center of the long, slowly unfolding catastrophe of the U.S. foreclosure crisis.

Emerging cohort trends in housing debt and home equity

Abstract Financial and market conditions in the 1990s caused a sharp increase in the housing debt (in constant dollars) of households now approaching or just past normal retirement age. Households now in middle age have also set new records for housing debt and will likely continue to carry high housing debt when they reach old age in 10 or 20 years. In the future, this housing debt burden is likely to lead to financial and housing adjustments that suggest a qualitative change in behavior when these households reach the later stages of their working life. Many will need to work longer to service housing debt. When facing a life‐cycle downturn in annual income, households will be increasingly motivated to tap into their home equity, both by borrowing, for those who stay in their homes, or by downsizing and liquidating some equity, for those who choose to move.