Despite the bad economy, Worcester is apparently proceeding apace in its bid to become a magnet for the creative class (or, in Michigan lingo, a cool city). The Daily Worcesteria notes that the renovated Hadley-Burwick Building on Main Street, once a furniture store, is now advertising for tenants on craigslist. The ad makes a pitch for […]
Housing
Posted inEconomy
Emptied nests
Failed mortgages are almost always more common in lower-income areas, but in the current housing crisis, all of the Bay State’s foreclosure hotspots are in communities with relatively low home values (see “Broken Homes”). During the last housing crash, in 1992 and 1993, there were predictably high foreclosure rates in cities like Brockton and Lowell, […]
Posted inEconomy
Broken homes
Helen Williams, of Dorchester, thought she was getting “a good deal”but is now facing foreclosure. Helen Williams certainly doesn’t know anything about credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, or mortgage-backed securities. It turns out there is a lot she didn’t even understand about the $395,000 mortgage she got to refinance the three-family house she owns […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
A foreclosure milestone on the West Coast
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 If you bought a house in Southern California last month, the previous owners probably didn’t leave willingly.
Posted inEconomy
Statistically Significant
Illustrations by Travis Foster FORECLOSURE CRISIS FLOODS DOUBLE-DECKERS The current foreclosure wave in Massachusetts has knocked down a disproportionate number of multifamily homes, at least compared with the housing market crash of the early 1990s. That’s one finding in Subprime Facts: What (We Think) We Know About the Subprime Crisis and What We Don’t, a […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Montana left standing in housing collapse
The number of new housing units built in the US was down by one quarter from the year before, according to recent data from the Census Bureau, depicted on the map below. Estimates for 2007 (final data for previous years here) show that fewer homes were built in every state except Montana and New York, […]
Posted inEconomy, Environment, The Download
Housing slump brings together Detroit and Las Vegas
USA Today has charts on the slump in housing sales and prices. We think we have it bad in Massachusetts, but the number of home sales fell by a relatively modest 10.3 percent here from the last quarter of 2006 to the last quarter of 2007. At least 32 states had sharper drops, with Nevada […]
Posted inEconomy
House hikes
UPDATE: Get town-level data on average property-tax bills for single-family households in 2000 and 2009 as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF. Note that the state’s Division of Local services does not calculate property-tax averages for communities granting residential exemptions, including Boston. property tax relief may be the Holy Grail of Massachusetts politics (it’s even touted as […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
The subprime virus
Writing for the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias points out that the subprime mortgage crisis is beginning to affect people who have the misfortune to live near people who made unfortunate decisions: …the crisis is harming the neighbors of people in foreclosure, even those who aren’t having trouble making loan payments. According to one academic study, every […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Wonder condos in Natick
Last week the New York Times reported on the 215 luxury condos going up next to a Natick mall, on the site of an old Wonder Bread factory: Applying the lifestyle-center model, where upscale retailers, sit-down restaurants, and condos are built around what looks like a city street, General Growth Properties has embarked on a […]