On a North Las Vegas street, escaping falling home prices
By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY
13 June 2011 NORTH LAS VEGAS — Dayna and Scott Merritt ask themselves almost every day if they should keep paying their mortgage. Many other residents on their street, Helens Pouroff Avenue, stopped long ago. Since the 69 new homes on this street were sold in 2006, almost half the owners have defaulted on their mortgages. Most of the houses went into foreclosure, which helped drive prices down for others on the street. The Merritts’ house has suffered a typical fate. The couple paid $385,000 for it in 2006. It’s now worth about $180,000, recent sales indicate, and Las Vegas prices are still falling. The Merritts are torn between continuing to sink money into a house that may never regain its value or finding a way out. They have plenty of company. About 11 million U.S. homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owe more on them than their homes are worth. Of those, 2 million are so deeply underwater that market researcher CoreLogic predicts their homes will go into foreclosure or distressed sales. The risk that more of those homeowners will default threatens housing markets nationwide, says CoreLogic economist Sam Khater. What’s happened here does little to quell those fears. Five years after the carnage began, those who walked from their Helens Pouroff homes say they’re recovering from financial ruin. Several say they’re considering buying homes again. But those still here have only seen values erode further. One by one, more consider an escape, which could mean walking away from their mortgage. “We’ve stuck it out. But there’s been no ‘attaboy,'” says Dayna Merritt, 43, a substitute teacher. “We’re paying on something that seems like it won’t work out for us.” The threat of defaults driven by continued home price declines — and a sputtering U.S. economy — is particularly acute in Las Vegas, the foreclosure capital of the U.S. for more than four years. Here, 66% of homeowners with a mortgage are underwater, compared with 23% nationwide. Almost one in four Nevadans who lost homes to foreclosure admitted in a survey that they walked away from their mortgages even though they could afford to pay, according to the Nevada Association of Realtors. …
Look at the properties! No land, no yard, no privacy, no garden, no place for kids to play outdoors, or dogs to run, just cheap constructions squeezed on tiny lots butting up each other. Perhaps these couples were blindfolded when they signed mortgages?
And that's not even the half of it. If you see it in person, its taken over more than half to three-quarters of residential neighborhoods of the city.