US housing crisis 'exaggerated', focused on only four states

US housing crisis 'exaggerated', focused on only four states

Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent March 05, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THE breadth of the US housing crisis for the average American is being overstated, according to a study released yesterday.
While foreclosures have booted millions of Americans from their homes, the study from the University of Virginia shows the trouble is mostly focused on four states -- California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada -- where home prices were the most overheated in the US housing boom.
Although there are pockets of substantial declines, claims that overall housing values have plummeted nationwide are exaggerated, they say. "In the Washington, DC metropolitan area, for example, prices have barely changed," the authors wrote.
In the University of Virginia study of 50 states, 35 metropolitan areas and 236 counties, the analysis indicated that "66 per cent of potential housing value losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California".
Then there was another 21 per cent in Florida, Nevada and Arizona -- meaning those four states made up about 87 per cent of national declines.
"California had only 10 per cent of the nation's housing units, but it had 34 per cent of foreclosures in 2008," say the report's authors, William Lucy and Jeff Herlitz. They say California was vulnerable to foreclosures because the median value of owner-occupied housing in 2007 was 8.3 times the median family income, while the 2007 national average was only 3.2 times higher than median family income.
Another vulnerability to foreclosures was seen in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where over 20 per cent of mortgage-holders in each county were paying at least 50 per cent of their income in housing-related costs.
They add that the number of foreclosures usually were lower in central cities than in some suburban counties, probably due to less demand in those suburbs.
The study notes the huge run-up in housing prices in California created opportunities for large gains for home buyers if price increases continued. "Thus, more households may have been attracted to potential gains, worried, perhaps, that they would be priced out of the home buying market if they did not act quickly," they said of the speculative bubble that emerged. They added that lenders such as former US mortgage giant Countrywide, which specialised in no-principal, interest-only and no-income check loans, got their start in California and focused there.
"But even in California, enormous variations existed among jurisdictions, such as in the San Francisco area, where (the outlying) Solano County had 3.69 per cent of housing units in foreclosure in November 2008, while only 0.24 per cent of housing units were in foreclosure in the City of San Francisco -- a 15 to 1 difference," Lucy and Herlitz say.
And of the financial crisis, the authors note that potential losses in housing values from 2008 foreclosures in all 50 states -- if values decline to 2000 levels -- were less than one-third of the $US350 billion provided to banks and insurance companies to cope with losses in mortgage-backed securities, Lucy and Herlitz add.
"Damage to the balance sheets of large banks and (insurer) AIG occurred not mainly from losses on foreclosed residential mortgages, but because of borrowing short-range to buy long-range derivatives and from selling credit default swaps insuring derivatives backed by mortgage payments," they write. "These financial manipulations had high-speed forward gears, but when the housing bubble burst, the banks and AIG discovered they had neglected to create a reverse gear with which they could separate foreclosed properties from some forms of mortgage-backed securities."