Foreclosure: There goes the neighborhood
Some of these neighborhoods are becoming foreclosure disaster zones. They’re places where three out of the four houses you find for sale are in foreclosure. That’s causing fear that these neighborhoods are already starting to fall apart.

Foreclosure: There goes the neighborhood
By Dave Fehling / 11 News
Jan 15, 2008
Video Report

You don’t have to lose your home in a foreclosure to suffer from the meltdown in the real estate market.

By analyzing real estate records, 11 News found neighborhoods where sky-high rates of foreclosure are a sign of possibly worse things to come.

Pray this doesn’t happen to your neighborhood.

11 News went house-shopping in neighborhoods where real estate records showed foreclosures are the worst.

Some of these neighborhoods are becoming foreclosure disaster zones. They’re places where three out of the four houses you find for sale are in foreclosure. That’s causing fear that these neighborhoods are already starting to fall apart.

11 News examined two in particular: Teal Run near 288 in Fort Bend County, and Bear Creek Meadows in far northwest Harris County where we met Nancy Callais.

“We must have at least six houses on every street for sale,” Callais said.

She and her family bought one of the brand new homes here just four years ago.

“The neighborhood was nice, but we get a lot of foreclosures because people don’t know about the taxes here,” she said. Those people’s incomes barely allowed them to pay the mortgage, let alone the property taxes.

“Lenders were giving people loans that shouldn’t have been allowed to have loans,” realtor Michael Weaster said. He specializes in foreclosed properties.

“It’s a bad thing for a neighborhood; it’s a bad thing for the city of Houston,” he said.

But how bad?

The fear is that these homes will be picked up by investors who will rent them out.

It happened in Houston 20 years ago after the oil bust, creating odd mixes of neighbors: people who owned their homes but couldn’t sell them, next door to rent homes owned by landlords who didn’t keep them up.

Crime went up—the quality of life, down.

And it’s already happening here.

“On this block, every home has been broken into,” Cliff Hicks said. He lives next door to a foreclosed home.

“Even since I’ve been here, it’s been vacant,” Hicks said.

Vacant and as a crack house for awhile, he said.

Down the street, graffiti appears on privacy fences faster than homeowners can power spray it away.

Will it get worse?

“I don’t agree with that,” Weaster said. He said he is selling some foreclosed homes to investors but the majority, 85 percent he guesses, are being bought by families.

“Everybody’s trying to hold on to their homes and pray something happens so they can afford their home and not lose it,” Callais said.

They are homeowners looking for a ray of hope and praying for a better day for real estate in Houston’s suburbs.

Realtors said the worse concentrations of foreclosures tend to be in outlying subdivisions of homes built in the last few years.

While no one knows what will happen this time, during the oil bust, it took 15 years for some homes to regain their original sale price.

http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou080114_ac_foreclosures.208edf98.html