Elite Detroit Neighborhoods Being Hammered By Foreclosures

In Detroit, Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reports:

• Palmer Woods never really looked like the rest of Detroit. It has baronial homes, gently curving streets with such names as Suffolk and Argyle Crescent, and flourishing Norway maples and red oaks that cast a sun-dappled screen across much of the neighborhood.

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• George Galster lives in Palmer Woods. He's also an expert on neighborhoods and has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a professor at Wayne State University. Galster said the housing crisis hitting Detroit in 2007 is "fundamentally different" from the long-term problem, which has occurred mostly in marginal areas of the city and which he attributes to metro Detroit building more housing units over the years than it can fill.

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• Historically, the least desirable houses are the ones that nobody is living in. After the owner can't find anyone to rent or buy the house, he or she often simply walks away from it. What's different now, Galster said, is that for the past couple of years "we're seeing the abandonment of some of the city's most desirable housing." Palmer Woods has experienced problems with squatters and scrappers stripping homes of valuable metals from pipes and wiring. Said Galster: "All of a sudden, neighborhoods that are well up the food chain in Detroit are subject to the same desperation, or desperadoes -- the insurance burning, the stripping, the mortgage scams, the occupancy by inappropriate individuals."

Palmer Woods is not the only elite neighborhood in Detroit that finds itself fighting an escalating battle with types of problems that have destroyed large swaths of the city. For more, see Elite neighborhoods try to stay that way (2 of city's worst problems creep into some of its upscale areas). BetaVacantForeclosure