|
Elgin is using federal money to help rehab foreclosed homes.
Lake County intends to use stimulus funds to acquire, fix up and resell abandoned or foreclosed properties.
Prosperous towns like Geneva, Schaumburg, Wheaton and Naperville are looking for ways to direct desperate homeowners to community resources.
All over the suburbs, towns continue to wrestle with the fallout of a crisis that has been deepening for years and, despite a steady stream of improving economic signs, shows few signs of improving soon. Figures released recently by the Woodstock Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit agency that among other goals promotes affordable housing, show that new foreclosure filings in the Chicago area spiked 18 percent in the third quarter compared to the same time a year ago, with some larger towns seeing hundreds more homes foreclosed during the 2009 period compared to 2008.
And, there may still be more to come.
"We're not done for a while," says bankruptcy attorney David Leibowitz. "We're going to continue to see high foreclosure filings until at least 2011."
Indeed, an Oklahoma City-based agency that tracks bankruptcies, Jupiter ESources LLC, reported Tuesday that individual bankruptcy filings have risen 25 percent nationwide compared to 2008. The 1.2 million bankruptcies filed through October have already surpassed last year's total of 1.1 million, Jupiter said. "Despite the recovery, several sectors remain in crisis," Kurt M. Carlson, a bankruptcy lawyer at Chicago-based Much Shelist Denenberg Ament & Rubenstein P.C., said in an e-mail. "The real estate markets haven't improved. Vacancy rates continue to climb. Those in manufacturing are cutting costs."
Experts see some hope in the possible expansion of the first-time homebuyer credit and efforts under way at the local government level.
Evan Geiselhart of HomeTrust Mortgage in Schaumburg sees that "purchase activity is up significantly" and Tom Kruiser, while acknowledging he thinks we're not out of the woods yet, points to low interest rates and stimulus packages that are spurring home sales.
Some local governments are attempting to push forward with their own efforts to provide relief to the desperate homeowner.
|
