{"id":543676,"date":"2010-04-26T18:06:12","date_gmt":"2010-04-26T22:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=83200"},"modified":"2010-04-26T18:06:12","modified_gmt":"2010-04-26T22:06:12","slug":"4-4-million-squatters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/543676","title":{"rendered":"4.4 Million Squatters?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Smith at Seeking Alpha has an interesting post <a href=\"http:\/\/seekingalpha.com\/article\/200657-squatters-4-4-million-and-counting?source=feed\">estimating<\/a> that the number of people living in their homes but not paying their mortgages &#8212; people delinquent on their mortgages, people in foreclosure, strategic defaulters and others &#8212; might be as high as 4.4 million. He uses FDIC and Foresight Analytics data to extrapolate:<span id=\"more-83200\"><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>14 percent of the approximately 52 million  residential mortgages outstanding in the U.S. were delinquent in the  first quarter. This amounts to 7.3 million mortgages. Only 5.5 percent were on  nonaccrual status, however. This amounts to 2.9 million mortgages. Nonaccrual means the lender is no longer posting income on the  loan. Depending on the length of time the loan has failed to accrue,  foreclosure proceedings may have already begun (with eviction to follow  at some point), but not necessarily. Assuming that  all loans on nonaccrual status represent vacant properties, it means at  least 4.4 million (7.3 &#8211; 2.9 = 4.4) are occupied by people who  are not paying for them, for whatever reason. This number has increased  by 3 million since the end of 2007.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ll note that if we presume that each household contains around 2.5 people (I don&#8217;t know whether households in foreclosure tend to be bigger or smaller than others), that works out to 11 million people. Other &#8220;squatter&#8221; estimates are similarly big. Moody&#8217;s Economy.com <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/60629f52-4cdc-11df-9977-00144feab49a.html\">has guessed<\/a> that 6 million people continue to live in their homes during delinquency or foreclosure, and a further 1 million are undergoing mortgage modification. Regardless of the exact count, it underscores the severity of the ongoing foreclosure crisis and the parlous state of the housing market &#8212; as well as the need for Congress to press for <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/82285\/panel-cites-problems-in-mortgage-modification-program\">principal reduction<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Smith at Seeking Alpha has an interesting post estimating that the number of people living in their homes but not paying their mortgages &#8212; people delinquent on their mortgages, people in foreclosure, strategic defaulters and others &#8212; might be as high as 4.4 million. He uses FDIC and Foresight Analytics data to extrapolate: 14 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}