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Cited: CNNMoney.com

There is good news for the real estate market; the number of mortgage borrowers who own more than their homes are worth is declining. There are now less people underwater with their mortgages, which is further evidence that the real estate free-fall may be slowing down.

Just 21% of all single-family homeowners owe more on their mortgage balances than their homes are worth, according to a third quarter residential real estate report from Zillow.com. That is down from 23% at the end of the second quarter.

That is good news because it should help reduce the number of homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure. Being underwater is one of the two factors that lead to foreclosure, the other being, of course, not having enough income to make the monthly payments.

“The decline in the percentage of homeowners with negative equity is a positive sign and is directly attributable to the stabilization of home values from the second quarter to the third,” said Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries.

But there’s a second, less-positive factor that contributed to the reduction in underwater borrowers: foreclosures. So many people have already lost their homes that the ranks of those underwater are slowly dwindling. And that highlights one of the most serious concerns that housing markets currently face. “Foreclosure rates,” said Humphries, “are ramping up again.”

Upswing

There are 1.2-1.5 million seriously delinquent mortgages sitting out there like ticking time-bombs. These loans are at least 90 days late, and, historically, few borrowers who fall that far behind manage to start repaying.

Aggravating the foreclosure problem is the substantial numbers of option ARM loans that will reset over the next few months. These are loans with balances that have steadily increased because borrowers were permitted to make minimum monthly payments that did not even cover interest.

The resets will require borrowers to start paying down principal, and many will simply not be able to afford to do that. Also resetting over the next several months will be many interest-only loans, which will also require borrowers to make much larger payments.

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Another fear-factor for Humphries is that continued economic malaise will slow the housing market recovery. Recent macro-economic reports have been inconsistent. Good news came early in November, with the gross domestic product, growing at annualized rate of 3.5% during the third quarter.

A couple days later, however, the Labor Department reported the unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% in October. It’s an understatement to say that losing a job can make it very difficult to pay off a mortgage.

Ghost hunting

Increased foreclosures also add to already long inventories. The National Association of Realtors reported there are 3.63 million homes on the market, a nearly eight-month supply at the current rates of sales. That’s a two or three month oversupply, compared with a normal market.

But official inventory statistics may be undercounting; there is also the so-called “shadow inventory.” For one, there are bank repossessions that have not been put back on the market. The banks have either fallen behind on processing these properties or they are reluctant to put REOs up for sale because the market is already overloaded.

The second element of the shadow inventory is that some individual owners would like to sell their homes but do not want to compete with foreclosures, which usually sell at a discount to market values. In many cities, foreclosures and short sales constitute the bulk of the market.

The housing market recovery will be affected by “how quickly these foreclosures transition back onto the marketplace,” said Humphries.

Nationally, 21.4% of all sales were REOs, the industry term for bank-owned properties. High as that rate is, that pales in comparison with some of the worst-hit metro areas. In Merced Calif., for example, 74.2% of all single-family home sales were of foreclosed properties; in nearby Stockton, the rate was 68.7%; and El Centro, down near the Mexican border, the rate was 68.1%.

There is one thing that could put a damper on home prices for many months to come and that is if REO sales do not increase at a blistering rate to keep up with the new inventory coming into the market. However, there is good news in many areas at least that foreclosures are selling quickly.

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My Take: I did not know that a mortgage could drown. The way some of these financing and real estate people use language to describe bad situations can be hilarious. Take for example people who have Nyack riverfront homes that realize their mortgage is drowning. First thing I would tell them is move away from the river.

I know the situation is not funny for many people. But really, you need to make light of all situations are bad just to be able to get through them sometimes. Laughter is always the best medicine. That means that even people with Piermont real estate who may be having problems need to look at the brighter side of the situation.

When this recession began, I was wondering where I was going to get the pay my mortgage. However, I managed squeeze pinch pennies by keeping my eye on November 2009. The reason I kept my eye on that date is because that was when the last payment would be paid. Of course, my mortgage was on a mobile home and not a house, which meant that my payment was lower. But it was still difficult at times and I made it!

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Cited: CNNMoney

Charlotte Street was an apocalyptic nightmare version of urban life. It is now received the greatest real estate makeover in history. New York City’s South Bronx, at one time, was the center of urban disaster. Not anymore! The cars and boats that sit in driveways in front of single-family homes along the strip are evidence of just that.

Weed-choked, junk-filled lots flanked the three-block stretch. Burned out tenement buildings punctuated the sky, and abandoned cars littered the landscape.

The street, like much of the rest of New York City’s South Bronx, had fallen to epic lows by the late 1970s. The area had disgorged nearly two-thirds of its population as living conditions declined and arson fires raged. Some landlords, unable to find tenants, torched their properties for insurance money. Other blazes were set by junkies, while still more were set by residents of public housing trying to get moved into nicer apartments.

“Charlotte Street was burning,” says Genevieve Brooks, a former resident. “Every day, I’d see the fires and smell the smoke. I slept with my shoes by my bed at night because you never knew if your building was next.”

Just three miles away, at Yankee Stadium, is where Howard Cosell uttered his famous line: “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”

No longer. In the three decades since Cosell introduced the world to the plight of the Bronx during the 1977 World Series, Charlotte Street has morphed into a haven of single-family ranch houses accented by backyards flourishing with fruit trees and flowers. Boats sit in driveways and above-ground swimming pools are common. It’s a slice of suburbia in one the country’s most urban — and poor — counties.

What happened to the Charlotte Street that President Carter called “the worst slum in America?” Or the Charlotte Street that President Reagan visited during a 1980 campaign swing? The one he compared — unfavorably — with London after the Blitz.

One of the greatest real estate turnarounds ever.

“Charlotte Street is thought of as quite a success story, particularly considering its context: It rose, phoenix-like, out of the ashes,” says Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Urban Studies.

Baby steps

One of the primary catalysts was Brooks, who had moved to Charlotte Street from South Carolina in the 1960s, when the neighborhood was racially mixed and thriving. But as the 1970s dawned, she watched the deterioration take hold.

When she asked her landlord about maintaining her building, he dismissed her. “He told me I should move to Queens, or Park Avenue,” she remembers. “I could have left. But I was single at the time, no children, so I didn’t have as much to lose.”

Instead, she knocked on neighbors’ doors and asked if they noticed the change. When they said “yes,” she formed a tenants association. Then she helped form a block association to lobby the city to pick up trash and abandoned cars, and to crack down on crime.

“We went down to the cellars and bagged tons of garbage, brought it upstairs and got Sanitation to pick it up,” she remembered. “The kids were excited about sweeping the streets. I would give them money for snacks. They would ask, ‘Miss Brooks can we sweep the street today?’”

Bigger strides

By 1974, tired of the small scale efforts, a host of neighborhood volunteers formed a group they called the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes to lobby for improvements throughout the community.

“There was a tremendous amount of community action,” says former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer. “That was the secret ingredient. The community refused to give up. They needed allies. They needed people who took the decline of the South Bronx as personally as they did.”

One of those people was urban planner Ed Logue, who was hired in 1978 to run a city agency called the South Bronx Development Office. The city was trying to erase the shame of its worst slums, and to do that Logue knew he would need the assistance of local organizations. The Desperadoes, headed by Brooks, were ready to step into the breach.

Brook’s and Logue’s vision was to go to the rotted core — Charlotte Street — and work outward. But most everyone advised them to rebuild starting from the healthy fringes. They wanted single-family homes; critics wanted density and multi-family dwellings, saying it would promote a lively, safe neighborhood and attract merchants.

“The conventional wisdom was that no one would invest their life savings in such a devastated area,” says Julie Sandorf, who worked with the MBD and is now president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, a New York City-based charity.

Brooks, though, knew most of the families in the area were African Americans from the South, Caribbean blacks and Puerto Ricans, and she was convinced that the long home-owning traditions of these groups would help make a community of single-family homes work.

So, she and Logue focused on convincing the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a newly launched nonprofit that had a $10 million grant from the Ford Foundation to assist burgeoning neighborhood revivals.

“There was so much devastation in the Charlotte Street area, it needed a big infusion of dollars,” Brooks remembers. “We were in the financial disaster stage.”

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Convincing skeptics

LISC was indeed interested in assisting in the South Bronx, but the foundation had its doubts about the plan. “People at LISC were skeptical about the notion of doing single-family homes in the South Bronx,” says CEO Michael Rubinger. “It was thought to be a crazy idea.”

But Logue and Brooks dazzled then-director Anita Miller with a vision of white picket fences. She agreed take a gamble and put up the $125,000 the groups needed to purchase two model homes.

Those first three-bedroom, two-bath ranch homes were manufactured in Pennsylvania and trucked over the George Washington Bridge one night in 1983. Sandorf and her husband were on site waiting for the trucks. The first people they saw was a rough looking street gang — whom Logue had hired to secure the grounds.

Still, Sandorf says, her husband was a little spooked. “He kept asking, ‘Where are all the lights?’ I had to tell him all those buildings are abandoned. There are no lights.” The homes were priced at about $50,000, and they sold like hot cakes. “We got more than 600 applications from potential buyers in the first three weeks,” says Sandorf.

Within three years, 92 homes would be built on the street and the area re-christened Charlotte Gardens. About 90% of the buyers were from the Bronx, according to Sandorf; many were low-income.

Homeownership was made possible by discounting the houses: Each property sold for between $50,000 and $59,000 even though it cost an average of $110,000 to build. The difference was funded through federal dollars, but the City of New York and various foundations also helped subsidize buyers.

“The houses in Charlotte Gardens were very deeply subsidized,” says former borough president Ferrer. “But it wasn’t just city money: That provided a stimulus for financial institutions who were reluctant to lend. We told the banks they had to get involved, they had to get up here and lend. Some admitted they had to eat crow: They never expected the complex to succeed.”

Shining example

But succeed it did. Original buyers invested and stayed; fewer than a dozen homes out of the 92 have ever been sold. Plus, while the rest of the country is being wracked by foreclosures, Charlotte Gardens has lost just one home to the plague.

“The selling of Charlotte Gardens is the extreme opposite story of what happened in the recent real estate debacle,” Sandorf says. “It is a shining example of how to do it right. House buyers were carefully selected and vetted. They were subjected to strict credit checks and homeownership counseling.”

Property values, too, have soared. Homes that originally went for $50,000 now sell for ten times that — when one is available. Currently, there is only one for-sale sign on all of Charlotte Street. The owners, who are original, have retired and are moving to Florida. They listed the property for $459,000 — which is still inexpensive by New York standards. Just across the river, in Manhattan, buyers pay that for a studio apartment.

“Sales are so rare that finding comparables to make an accurate appraisal is very hard,” says Tina Gordon, the Century 21 real estate agent for the property.

“We didn’t know what we were doing when we started, but we did know we had to do this ourselves,” says Genevieve Brooks.

Several years ago Genevieve Brooks and her husband retired and moved back to South Carolina weren’t they have family. They were one of the few that sold their home. Tuesday, they still return to visit friends in Charlotte Gardens often

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My Take: When are they going to start more programs like this? There are so many different neighborhoods around the country in various cities that could use a makeover like this. It would also give low income families the chance to own their own home at a reduced price.

Maybe they could start in Virginia by hiring Alexandria Virginia cleaning services to come in and clean old homes. They could start in Washington DC and get the president’s attention by getting some Washington DC residential cleaning done. But, I doubt that even in Maryland that just getting Maryland house cleaning services will be enough. Even Bethesda home cleaning services wouldn’t be enough for some of the rundown real estate in this country.

Many did you start tearing down rundown houses and rebuilding and not just in New York. There are people across this country who would love to own their own home but can’t because they don’t have the money.

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