I will take you up on that challenge – I’ll clean things up a bit and pass it along to Jim – he can post them or leave them here in the comments.

I think you’re the one with ideological blinders – social engineering has given us a lot of problems – here in c’ville: Vinegar Hill, Friendship Square, Westhaven, and the associated problems of high-density poverty, but the housing bubble is not one of them.

The anti-redlining stuff was on the books for over a decade before the bubble really got underway – of course, in those days, the only big secondary market for that funding was the Fed: FNME, FRE, who where…wait for it…at least somewhat regulated – they made loans to marginal borrowers, but had to actually verify employment and assets, no NINA loans allowed. The party didn’t get out of control until LEH, BSC, JPM, MS, MER and UBS got in on the action and started pumping this stuff out hand over fist, completely without regulation.

Think for yourself, don’t let the right-wing noise-machine do it for you.

Numbers forthcoming…my favorites are the experts in housing values – Realtor flippers like Doug McGowan and mortgage brokers like Chris Prang – the financially sophisticated and responsible people – not that low-rent riff raff who never should have been able to buy their own place!

Try and post “The data I’ve collected” somewhere and you might convince me that foreclosures are not largely confined to poor and poorly educated.

As for social engineering, to deny it is a major cause just belies your ideology. I am willing to accept that a lack of regulation also played a large part, but when a lower-income family on my street got foreclosed last month for a relatively low $200k debt, I’m gonna trust my eyes more than “The data I’ve collected.” Post it. Back up your words.

Mark – much as you and the GOP want to try to spin the blame for this mess away from the total lack of regulation of the RMBS market and the CDSes need to insure that market, courtesy of the GOP ideology of deregulation, and place it on anti-redlining legislation, that’s not the truth. And the fact that foreclosures in our area are just as heavily represented among the wealthy as they are among the ’subprime’. The study focuses on the low income neighborhoods, but the data I’ve collected on trustee’s sales show that just as much of this is going on in ‘wealthy’ areas – Western Albemarle, for example. Secondly, just wait until that second wave of resets hits – the “Alt A” which is essentially subprime for “sophisticated” borrowers with good credit scores.

Try again. This is NOT the result of social engineering – it’s the result of a credit bubble enabled by unregulated credit markets (that would be “the smartest guys in the room” and the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street). Clinton and Rubin were complicit, but they were following the Reagan doctrine.

In the meantime, house prices doubled and priced out a lot of people. Many of the priced out turned to too-good-to-be-true loans. As this relates to poor people in C-ville, poor and less educated are more likely to go for interest-only type loans. But we have our government to thank for the fact that they were able to get loans in the first place. The government, human greed, and the death of personal responsibility.

We are in store for a lot of thrashing and screaming about the housing/mortgage mess this year from the folks in Washington DC. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Obama crew has no clue as to how to solve the problems and so far there is every indication that their solutions will be like swinging at shadows. The real danger here is that they will end up punching a tar baby and the unintended consequences of their attempts to cure the crisis will end up making things worse. In my mind the problem is a simple supply demand imbalance and until we do something to return to some semblance of parody and create consumer confidence, building a floor in these markets will be impossible. And loaning the middle class a couple of hundred or even a couple of thousand dollars through a tax refund will do little or nothing to encourage people to go out and buy a home or even a car for that matter.

As the sun sets on the housing market here in S.W. Florida the shadows of foreclosure grows ever larger. The number of homes that will ultimately be dumped on this market is staggering. As it stands now Lee County leads the nation in foreclosures and every day dozens of people simply “walk away” from their obligations. That’s not to say they are leaving town, quite to the contrary, they are staying put waiting out the required action by the local court that would put them out on the street. In fact there are web sites like Walkaway.com that offer to aid and abet the scofflaws that want to defraud their lender by suggesting strategies that will allow them to live rent free for up to 2 years while they fend off their lender’s attempts to make them pay up.

The simple solution is for HUD to take a page out of the Department of Agriculture playbook and provide price support by warehousing surplus housing in order to create a market floor. However, with the promised coming “change” the problem then will be for communities across the nation just who the people administrating the New Obama Nation will choose to move into these government owned houses.