Detroit-Area Columnist: "Mortgage Lending Turned Into A Michigan Carnival Act"

A columnist in The Detroit News comments on the wreckage left in southeastern Michigan by the real estate boom and crash - how it happened, why state officials looked the other way and are now doing nothing about it. Excerpts from the column:

• Once a boring and staid business, mortgage lending turned into a Michigan carnival act. Now, as my colleague Ron French so vividly describes in his powerful series this week, southeastern Michigan is a kingdom of foreclosure, a place where yesterday's dream houses are today's vacant, marked down shells. Detroit's neighborhoods are hardest hit. But foreclosures are as common as crabgrass in the suburbs too, easy to spot in every neighborhood from Grosse Pointe to Bloomfield Hills to Oakland Township.

For more, see Mortgage fraud gets attention too late.

See also, Lax oversight spurs foreclosures (Loan officers not licensed) (The Detroit News).