Upside down

Star Tribune Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:47:19 GMT
Minnesota's new ghost towns

In Wright County, reckless speculation and the mortgage meltdown have turned subdivisions into virtual ghost towns. Jon Colvin, 38, a telephone network technician and father of six children, had just informed CitiFinancial that he would be unable to make his March mortgage payment, and would probably miss April's, too. He hoped the news would finally scare the bank into renegotiating a mortgage he can't afford for a house he can't sell -- and now wishes he had never bought. "It's not something I feel proud doing," Colvin said of missing the payments. "But how else am I going to get the bank's attention?" The reckoning inside the Colvins' four-year-old home is playing out at kitchen tables and corporate boardrooms across Minnesota -- and the world. For the first time in decades, U.S. home values are plunging, dragging economies around the world down with them. The roots of that financial crisis can be found in places like Wright County, where the combination of affordable land, cheap money and boundless optimism lured builders and families chasing big homes in the kind of brand-new subdivisions they thought were beyond their reach.

[[keywords: LandUse;Housing;PropertyTax;Metro;]]