Record home sales at foreclosure auctions spurns moratorium drive

[UpInArms]

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10931430&BRD=2212&PAG=461&dept_id=465812&rfi=6

Because a record number of homeowners cannot pay their mortgages, City Council, the sheriff and several advocacy groups are trying to convince a judge to suspend the city's foreclosure auctions, which this week saw a record 1,120 homes up for bid.

"This is the worst time for foreclosures basically since the Great Depression," said John Dodds, director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, the group leading the moratorium drive. "Something has to be done. You can't keep letting hundreds and hundreds of people lose their home every week."

The national rate of homes in foreclosure peaked at a record high of 1.2 percent of all mortgages in the first quarter of 2003. Experts say it takes between six months and a year for foreclosed homes to make it to auction, meaning a record number may now be on the block, though no one tracks that number.

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[hackwriter]

1. Sure they can...it's part of their plan

It's all part of the plan to eliminate the middle class. Eliminate their jobs, force them into their foreclosure, then buy up their homes for a song. Then we'll have all the property owned by the rich, with the rest of us as serfs.

That's the Shrubco plan.

[SoCalDem]

6. How else will the rich folks build up their "rental empire"

This is how they get their mitts on all those bargain houses. And once someone has been foreclosed on, their credit is shit and they will not even be able to rent one of those houses..

....

[FlaGranny]

9. It can't

go on forever - once they eliminate the middle class, there will be no one left to buy, buy, buy. It won't be pretty.

[leesa]

10. It's that bit of lost logic, I can't understand. Who will be left to buy

their crap when none of us have jobs?

[DemoTex]

2. It's the Bu$h legacy: The true meaning of "Compassionate Conservatism."

The soup kitchen where I do volunteer work when I am in Dallas served 575 lunchtime meals one day last week, an all time record. The homeless population of Dallas is obviously larger than it has been in a decade. Life is real tough now, for the street people in Dallas. At least Dallas' weather is a bit warmer than Philly's.

Meanwhile, up the road in Highland Park, bulldozers level perfectly good 4000 sq. ft. homes to build obscene 10,000+ sq. ft. homes. The parking lot at Highland Park Village is full of top-end luxury cars, and I do mean the absolute top end. Every day I watch a near-constant stream of Gulfstream's, Falcon Jets, Learjets, and corporate Boeings come and go from near-by Love Field, transporting corporate bigwigs and rich fat-cats in sumptuous comfort and luxury (while the rest of us Que-up to be herded into cattle-car class just to sit at the gate because of ATC gate-holds caused by the proliferation of small airplanes carrying few people using the same amount of airspace as big airplanes carrying many people). Life is good for the swells.

[madrchsod]

3. same here in ronnie land

alot of first time buyers going under..welcome to bush`s vision of america.

[ninkasi]

4. Truly shameful...

We have allowed an arrogant, spoiled, sociopathic twit to steal the presidency, and ruin millions of lives. Bush is a uniter, all right...the super-rich vs. the rest of us. We can't continue to allow this pathetic excuse for a human being destroy our country any longer.

The elections can't come soon enough for me; when he's voted out, we can start repairing the damage.

[murielm99]

5. I have noticed the same thing here.

I live in northern Illinois. I read a daily paper from a larger community, and a weekly from my town. There are always several pages of legals, listing the home forclosures. I have never seen so many of them in the twenty-five years that I have lived in this area.

[expatriot]

7. Is this the long awaited bursting of the real estate bubble?

How many foreclosures can the bubble handle?

[SoCalDem]

8. Every lost job equals a lost home..

It may take a few months to run through the meager savings, or they may hang on longer by using the equity to live on, but with families dependent on TWO incomes just to make the housepayment/rent, when one of those goes.. they are SUNK..

Here in CA we have a lot of grocery clerks married to grocery clerks and they have had no income since November, while the stores try to break the union.. Lots of houses are being lost in that fiasco..

Now Ahhhnold is ready to weigh in.. I am sure he will do a great job.. look at how well he settled the Enron suit.:eyes:

and Walmart is building a behemoth SuperStore in our town....more union clerks' jobs down the drain..

They will "hire" some of the clerks at half the pay with no benefits and not even have to train them much..

Once the WM gets finished, the other stores in town will be hurting because most of the new housing is in the area where the WM is going up.. When sales are down in the grocery industry, hours get cut.. Fall below the minimum and the insurance goes bye-bye..and then there will be layoffs too..:(