Foreclosures lead to another problem: suburban blight

Nobody bothered Ron Anderson -- who is 6 foot 2 and weighs 240 pounds -- as he replaced busted windows, painted over graffiti and removed empty beer bottles from what had once been a quaint family abode.

"I told the old owner that we needed a live body in there to show the trespassers that it wasn't an abandoned house," said Anderson, 47, of Century 21 Success' Signal Hill office, who rented and lived in the ranch-style Towne Avenue home for eights months before it sold. "Most of the times properties are invaded because there is nobody there to stop them."

Unfortunately, there's just one Anderson and scads of empty foreclosure homes, as a market gashed by sub-prime mortgages staggers into its second year. Nearly 32,000 Californians lost their homes in the quarter ending Dec. 31, a new record, according to DataQuick Information Service.

If experiences from the housing dip of the '90s and recent studies are any barometer, even homeowners sitting pretty with their own mortgages should be concerned about vacant houses.

Every time a neighborhood experiences 2.8 foreclosures out of 100 owner-occupied properties in a single year, crime there and in the surrounding blocks jumps 6.7%, according to a 2006 census tract study by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute. A related study by the same researchers concluded that homeowners lose 0.9% of their property value if they are within one-eighth of a mile from a conventionally foreclosed-on, single-family residence. A $500,000 home, for example, would drop $4,500.

"The value of your property is tied to the ability to sell it, and if somebody comes to your block and sees a property across the street with boarded-up windows, looking battered, that's an exponential impact," said Geoff Smith, one of the study's authors. In densely packed communities, a concentration of foreclosures makes it even harder for other homes to sell, he added.

Although empty residences are a hot topic for communities, they are not a popular subject for some lenders.

Washington Mutual, for example, won't divulge its policies toward unoccupied, foreclosed-on houses, company spokesman Gary Kishner said.