Scenarios post foreclosure crisis in Catalonia: accumulation of housing by banks as the first step for the rise of large private landlords

The article analyses the uneven geography of foreclosed housing owned by large private landlords in Catalonia. A Negative Binomial Model is applied to identify the local determinants of the concentration patterns of 32,941 housing units in Catalan cities. Indicators of socioeconomic vulnerability, such as the percentage of foreign population or the percentage of unemployed residents, are identified as key explanatory factors of the regional geography of housing accumulated by banks which, in turn, correspond to areas in which global corporate landlords are focusing their business for profiteering from the rental market in the current expansionist phase of the housing cycle. Our findings demonstrate that the concentration of properties in the most vulnerable areas was fuelled by foreclosures responsibility of banks rescued with public funds. In tandem, we provide detailed information for the understanding of the new scenarios that have emerged during the post-crisis phase.

The Rental Crisis Will Not Be Televised: The Case for Protecting Tenants Under Consumer Protection Regimes

The Foreclosure Crisis of the 2000s has likely hurt renters more than homeowners. Incongruously, however, consumer enforcement agencies have been far more zealous in protecting mortgagors than tenants. This Article explores the under-protection of tenants as a class of consumers, particularly in a “commoditized” rental market, and examines how consumer enforcement agencies can more zealously incorporate tenant-protection into their mandates. Much of the prior literature on the legal protections afforded tenants was published in the wake of the consumer rights revolution of the 1970s. This Article is the first to carefully reexamine, in the context of the modern rental market, whether tenants should be protected as consumers and whether tenants have truly reaped the benefits of consumer gains over the last half-century. The Article analyzes original interviews with state consumer protection agencies, engages in the first broad survey of state and federal tenant protection enforcement actions, and provides a new review of the caselaw addressing whether tenants are covered by consumer protection regimes. Concluding that achieving systemic change through broad-scale policing of the rental industry is both vital and often overlooked, the Article proposes specific reforms that consumer protection agencies can adopt to better protect tenants.

Subprime May Not Have Caused the 2000s Housing Crisis: Evidence from Cleveland, Ohio

During the 2000s housing bust, Cleveland’s Slavic Village was dubbed “ground zero of the foreclosure crisis” by the national media. Despite this, during the preceding housing boom Cleveland had stable house price growth and relatively low mortgage debt growth, a stark contrast to circumstances in areas such as California that had exceptionally high house price and mortgage debt growth. What explains the relatively minor housing boom and perceived sharp downturn in Cleveland? In this Commentary I show that while subprime debt was a prominent source of debt in Cleveland and especially in its Slavic Village neighborhood during the 2000s, it is difficult to peg subprime debt as playing a causal role in the subsequent foreclosure crisis.

Capitalizing on Collapse: An Analysis of Institutional Single-Family Rental Investors

A well-documented consequence of the recent foreclosure crisis was a pronounced dislocation in the single-family home market. Large institutional buyers emerged to capitalize on this dislocation. These firms acquired hundreds of thousands of single-family homes to create a pool of single-family rentals (SFRs) in markets across the United States. Existing analyses of institutional investors focus on their aggregate characteristics and associated community effects, showing faster housing recovery in places hard hit by foreclosure but also increases in evictions and home prices. Relatively little is known about individual firms’ strategies or how they have evolved over time—knowledge that is critical to understanding the diversity of these actors and establishing causal links to community impacts. We help fill this gap by using quantitative and qualitative data from the corporate filings of publicly traded SFR companies to understand the industry’s birth, growth and development, strategies and approaches, and points of differentiation.

The Foreclosure Crisis, Community Change, and the Cognitive Health of Older Adults

Objectives While home foreclosures are often thought of as a household-level event, the consequences may be far-reaching, and spill over to the broader community. Older adults, in particular, could be affected by the spiral of community changes that result from foreclosures, but we know very little about how the foreclosure crisis is related to older adult health, in particular cognition. Method This article uses growth curve models and data from the Health and Retirement Study matched to Census and county-level foreclosure data to examine whether community foreclosures are related to older adults’ cognitive health and the mechanisms responsible. Results We find that higher rates of county-level foreclosures are associated with a faster decline in individual cognition at older ages. Although we examined an extensive number of individual and community mechanisms, including individual housing wealth and depressive symptoms, community structural factors, social factors, and perceptions of physical disorder and cohesion, none of the mechanisms examined here explained this relationship. Discussion This study shows that the adverse consequences of home foreclosures spill over to the local community, with implications for the cognitive health of older adults.

Racialized Recovery: Postforeclosure Pathways in Boston Neighborhoods

Following the Great Recession, homeownership rates declined precipitously, raising concerns for the stability and well–being of neighborhoods. While many studies document shifts in household constraints, this article draws from foreclosure records from 2006 to 2011, subsequent transactions, tax exemption filings, and maintenance data in Boston, Massachusetts to show how the foreclosure crisis altered the landscape of ownership and unfolded differentially across hard–hit neighborhoods. Results from logistic regression analyses show that corporate investors were more likely to purchase foreclosures in predominantly black hard–hit neighborhoods, while owner–occupants were more likely to purchase foreclosures in hard–hit mixed–ethnoracial neighborhoods with substantial shares of non–Hispanic/Latinx whites. Relative to other foreclosure buyers, corporations were more likely to resell previously foreclosed properties to other investors and have reported maintenance issues against them. The findings have implications for further disadvantages for hard–hit black neighborhoods and highlight how the housing crisis exacerbated neighborhood inequality by race and ethnicity.

Models of Collaborative Governance: The City of Los Angeles’ Foreclosure Registry Program

The economic recession of 2007–2013 brought many challenges to nations and cities throughout the world. Los Angeles experienced a foreclosure crisis that brought instability in the real property market, resulting in property loss and loss of revenue from property taxes and increasing demands on city resources from blighted properties. The paper begins with a background of the problem related to blighted properties and proceeds a literature review related to the five phases to the development and implementation of a governance network. The paper then examines a case study—the City of Los Angeles Foreclosure Registry Program’s governance network to reduce blight—to assess the phases taken to learn if the theory of network design offers meaningful direction and insight. The paper closes with an evaluation of the consistency regarding the literature related to the five phases of governance network development and its implementation by the City of Los Angeles.