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Wednesday, May 14, 2008 --- 85 days ago http://newsquake.netscape.com/2008/04/23/overlooked-wright-countys-ghost-towns/
| Filed under: Business and Money Story: Minnesota's New Ghost Towns Propeller user: Buglover If there's an epicenter to the country's real-estate downturn, it may be just be Wright County in Northwest Minnesota. As outlined in the recent three-part Star-Tribune feature "From Boom to Bust," the county, located 30 miles from the Twin Cities, is facing the brunt of the subprime mortgage meltdown and overbuilding. Starting in the late 1990s, ambitious developers carved out large acreages, building inexpensive subdivisions and selling many of the units to buyers as investments. Today, these same homes in Wright County, which has a population of about 114,787, have gone unsold or been abandoned by buyers unable to pay their mortgage payments. This has in turn created an epidemic of "ghost-towns." As the Star-Tribune notes: "There are few trees or hills in this flat, predominantly rural county to obscure the evidence: Rows of vacant and unfinished homes, often with lockboxes on the front doors and foreclosure notices taped to the windows. Realtors call them 'see-through houses,' so empty of furniture and curtains that it's possible to see right through them." Values in the country have declined 30 percent in the last year. (By comparison, in Los Angeles County, also considered a down market, the median sale price declined 18.5 percent from a year ago.) Wright County is bracing for 1,080 foreclosures this year, up 43 percent f ... |
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