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Title: Prelude to the Subprime Crash: Beecher, Michigan, and the Origins of the Suburban Crisis
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2012
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Abstract: The subprime lending catastrophe and the Great Recession that it triggered have cast a pall over the postindustrial city of Flint, Michigan, and its increasingly bleak suburbs. Arriving after many years of General Motors (GM) factory shutdowns, gnawing population losses, and an earlier episode of predatory lending that very few people even remember today, the most recent rash of home foreclosures has shaken this already ailing metropolis in a relentless, decade-long aftershock. According to most local observers, the Vehicle Citys latest meltdown commenced shortly after the dawn of the new millennium, when thousands of area homeownersmany of them financially overstretched by a combination of unemployment and high-interest subprime loansbegan defaulting on their mortgages and property taxes. Between 2002 and 2009, officials from the Genesee County Land Bank, a public receiver for abandoned and tax-foreclosed properties, quietly repossessed nine thousand homes, businesses, and lots just within Flint, a figure that accounted for 14 percent of the citys overall surface area. Meanwhile, in the private lending market, mortgage foreclosures were surging to Depression-era levels, routinely exceeding a thousand homes per month. Just during September 2010, [End Page 572] for instance, nearly 1 percent of the regions two hundred thousand housing units slipped into foreclosure. By decades end, the toxic trio of deindustrialization, tax delinquency, and predatory lending had pummeled the local housing market into a state of near collapse, with average sale prices for homes in Flint reduced to just $17,000significantly cheaper than the Buick sedans that GM workers once assembled on the citys North End...
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Authors: Highsmith, Andrew R.
Periodical (Full): Journal of Public Policy
Issue: 4
Volume: 24
Pages: 572-611
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Housing and Segregation, Other
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