California’s Inland Empire region, which includes my hometown(s) Rancho Mirage/Palm Desert, has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. This video from KCET’s “SoCal Connected” gives a good, and depressing, overview of just how bad it is out there.

NYTimes: “The Pools of Riverside County”, 1/30/2008

Look around at the still-life of half-built neighborhoods and red-tiled roofs, all so new, planted during the Miracle-Gro years when homes became A.T.M.s.

Look closer and you think you’re staring into a ghost exurb – empty homes left to bankers. This is the new America, Southern California’s affordable edge city, drowning in a sea of debt. In the Inland Empire, the eastern-most suburbs of Los Angeles, one out of every 43 households is facing foreclosure proceedings.
Peek behind the palm trees and there you see the most shocking sight: abandoned swimming pools, fetid and green, left to the elements and choked with algae. Thousands of people have walked away without even draining the water. Mosquito control agents now patrol these murky pools, treating them with pesticides to keep disease-carrying larvae from forming.

[...]

The new year dawned with banks set to repossess more homes than any time since the Great Depression – about 2 million residences, according to various forecasts.

Is this the image of our consumptive age: the empty swimming pools of Riverside County? The epitome of middle-class life as just another cash play? People who took out loans on houses they never could afford, hoping for a quick flip, have left this squalor under the sun to the mosquito-control agents.

Or maybe we should look just to the west, to Orange County and beyond, to the half-empty glass hulks of the banks that changed the rules of lending – Ameriquest, New Century and Countrywide, now being picked over by federal investigators and civil litigants.

[...]

Riverside County, stretching from Orange County to the Arizona border, is nearly the size of New Jersey. It added more than half million people in the last six years. Four years ago, this was Bush Country, with Republicans winning nearly all of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America, places like Loudoun County, Virginia, or Douglas County, Colorado.

Now, if you want to find some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, you go the places where exurban America is pushing into farm fields and forests. In 2005 there were 12 home foreclosures in Loudoun County. Last year, more than 600.

Any fix to this mess won’t be easy. President Bush has proposed a plan. Democrats say it doesn’t go far enough. Who will get the blame, the backhand from those new homes filled with new voters?

People who bet their pensions, their savings, their college funds on something that seemed so safe now look at these wrecks on the banking frontier and wonder: what were we thinking?

It’s obvious what we were thinking, all of us – homeowners, appraisers, brokers, buyers, bankers. We were all in on the bet.

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