Sunday, February 17, 2008

Homeless Foreclosure Story Goes National

Associated Press Story Today on Foreclosures

The Associated Press published a story today about the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland. A story by Tom Sheeran went out across the wires in the United States and was published in Chicago, DC, Detroit, and pretty much every city in the United States. It appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network here and SF paper here and Detroit here. It immediately shot our website traffic from about 122 a day to 800 today. We had as many people visiting our website in the first 17 days of February as we had in all of January.

I talked to a friend in Texas who could not understand this problem we face in Ohio. The foreclosure crisis is much different in the other parts of the country. Most of the foreclosures in Austin were in suburban, usually higher end neighborhoods, and far away from the homeless population. He said that the police would be quick to respond to a squatter in the areas where foreclosures are cropping up in Austin. It is so different in Cleveland. Almost every neighborhood has witnessed the devastation of foreclosed properties. The temptation of all these abandoned properties is too much. Any walk down the any street in Cleveland has obvious empty houses. There is no way that law enforcement or community groups can monitor all these properties. Foreclosures are really bad in Cleveland.

Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.

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