housing

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

The foreclosure crisis has taken a turn in California’s wealthy Marin County, according to Miriam Alex-Lute at Rooflines. Marin residents waged a legal fight a few years back to keep out Habitat for Humanity, the charitable group that builds houses for low-income buyers. But now that abandoned, foreclosed houses are showing up in Marin, Lute [...]

Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported.
The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum [...]

The PBS star attracted crowds to what appeared on the surface as a way to help black borrowers build wealth, but a lawsuit alleges it was actually just the opposite.

The Minnesota Independent’s Andy Birkey has the details:
Days after Rep. Michele Bachmann [R-Minn.] launched a petition against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN is shooting back with a petition of its own.
“When you pick on ACORN, you pick on ME!” the petition says. “Congresswoman Michele Bachmann would rather pick on ACORN than [...]

The New York Times takes a swipe at the Obama administration today, in a sobering editorial warning that more needs to be done to address the alarming number of Americans continuing to lose their homes to foreclosure.
The editorial notes a reality that is coming increasingly into focus: Loan modification programs that reduce monthly payments may [...]

As Ryan pointed out, the new figures on March home sales weren’t great — but they weren’t entirely awful, either. A small but growing number of metropolitan areas could be seeing a bottom to the housing market crash.
While that’s encouraging, one trend that Calculated Risk has been writing about for a while now doesn’t seem [...]

The end of the month heralds the publication of the latest S&P/Case-Shiller data on home prices, and today’s the lucky day. Predictably, prominent media organizations are discussing the release in the present tense, despite the fact that it contains the March data. The new figures bring an unfortunate splash of cold water from that month [...]

Mortgage giants made no public effort to inform housing attorneys of changes to anti-foreclosure and eviction program.

Though they have accepted billions in federal bailout funds, banks are not required to ensure foreclosures don’t drag down surrounding communities.