How Flips & Scams Have Hurt One Southern California Neighborhood

Reuters reports the story of several homeowners who thought they bought their "dream home" in the recently constructed Towne Square development in the area of California known as the Inland Empire (50 miles east of Los Angeles), only to now find themselves stuck in a neighborhood "pocked with boarded windows and dead lawns -- homes now repossessed after buyers failed to make mounting mortgage payments."

In addition, it is reported that, in this development of 49 homes, "[t]he Corona Police Department said it was called about neighborhood disturbances on [one street] 35 times in 2006. The street that runs parallel ... received 28 complaints." Declining property values have left those existing homeowners not willing to "mail in the keys to the mortgage lender and walk away" from the neighborhood "locked in" to their current homes. For more, see Flips, scams blamed in California housing decline.