A friend emailed me an interesting article from the Washingon Post yesterday entitled “Improving Housing Market Stirs Hope.” She said:
I think it’s the first time I’ve heard a real estate agent actually connecting the resolution with our foreclosure rate – at least in print.
I know we have batted this issue around on the blog before and that the Smutster has speculated that PWC is a real real estate forerunner, but is this a different note from MSM?
According to the Washington Post:
Residential sales in Prince William County are up, and home prices are stabilizing — positive changes, county officials said, for a locality once dubbed the epicenter of the region’s foreclosure crisis.
“We’re cautiously optimistic,” said Christopher E. Martino, county finance director, who spoke to county supervisors Tuesday. “The rate of foreclosure activity has decreased substantially, activity has picked up and our inventory is declining.”
Through May, county officials had recorded 1,514 foreclosures, down from 2,319 recorded for the same period last year. Martino said the county had about 6,500 foreclosures last year.
Real estate experts said several factors were to blame for the rise in foreclosures last year, including unscrupulous lending practices and the county’s anti-illegal immigration policies, which drove away some Hispanics.
Martino said the county was also growing faster and had more affordable housing, which created momentum before the housing market collapsed nationwide.
The market turnaround “is obviously good news,” said Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Board of County Supervisors. “A couple of us said Prince William would be the first in and the first out. Now there is . . . finite data that we are coming out of the housing recession.”
Many of us have questioned why Prince William County was hit so much sooner and so much harder compared to other nearby jurisdictions by foreclosures. We held top superlative honors for a fairly long time in Virginia.
What do our contributors think? How does it help us if houses sell for 1/3 of what they were worth 2 years ago? Does that run our property values down even more? Did the Immigration Resolution help bring us quicker and harder to many of the ugly aspects of the housing crisis? Some of our politicians and blogger seemed to want it both ways in the past. They wanted to claim responsibility for cleaning up PWC with the Immigration Resolution and at the same time blame the immigrant community, specifically ‘illegals’ for our foreclosure problems. Which is it? What say you?
