Foreclosures Force Suburbs to Fight Blight - New York Times

Three years ago I predicted something like this would happen. I did not foresee suburbanites taking this panicked solution, though.

In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation’s hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.

In suburbs like this one, officials are installing alarms, fixing broken windows and mowing lawns at the vacant houses in hopes of preventing a snowball effect, in which surrounding property values suffer and worried neighbors move away. The officials are also working with financially troubled homeowners to renegotiate debts or, when eviction is unavoidable, to find apartments.

Personally, I get kind of giggly about snowballing real-estate panic. For the last ten years people have chosen to spend more and more on houses that were getting cheaper and cheaper. Investors were buying up properties, performing minor cosmetic renovations, and then reselling them to unsuspecting buyers who actually believed that shit in the news about, "Now is the time to take advantage of the low interest rates." When prices soared so high, it was going to become necessary for a crash to ensue. Don't worry. Thanks to Federal Reserve Banking, we now have invisible crashes lost to ambiguous inflationary forces. You won't even see it happen.