Foreclosure Alley

In some St. Paul neighborhoods the foreclosure rates are high and in others they are low, but with in the neighborhoods with the highest foreclosure rates  there are pockets here and there that have been devastated by foreclosures.  Entire blocks where 40 to 70% of the houses are boarded up and vacant.  Most of these homes are not on the market and many of them are those registered vacant buildings  l write about.  That means they need a lot of work. Many of these homes were rental properties.  The vacancy rate for rental properties is at the highest it has been in 30 years and is at around 8%, and rental rates have gone down. 

These homes are not really counted anywhere so I don't know how many there are. It is often hard to determine who owns them. Some that have been on and off the market.  In some cases they were purchased by an investor who never made a payment on them. 

This home on Forbes street in St. Paul has been vacant for a couple of years. It sits next to four other homes that have the blue notices on the door. Just down the street there are more. There is one that isn't on a list anywhere that has been on the market most of the time since early 2006.  It sits vacant and has for a long time.  It is a huge house all chopped up into apartments and one of the few vacant homes that I have been in that creeped me out.  Mostly because of the small rooms and dark hallways.  The insides of some of these homes are such a mess that they would have to be gutted to be rehabbed and in some cases I suspect that it might be best to tear them down and start over.

When these homes were turned into rentals they used loads of paneling and put it in from floor to ceiling and covered the old floors with vinyl tile and cheap carpeting and painted everything that wasn't vinyl, cheap or paneling white.  Now they are what I call urban blight. 

The city attached a lot of rules to the category 2 and 3 registered vacant buildings, they are held to a much higher standard than the homes that most of us live in.  I doubt if many would have the funds to rehab them and even if they did the homes would be worth less than the amount of money that would have to go into them.