Foreclosures way, way up in April

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Just how bad is the economy? Just how bad is it out there for homeowners? Judging by the latest numbers, it's really bad, and getting worse:

Foreclosures in April exceeded even March's blistering pace with a record 342,000 homes receiving notices of default, auction notices or undergoing bank repossessions, according to a regular industry report.

One of every 374 U.S. homes received a filing during the month, the highest monthly rate that RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties, has recorded in four-plus years of record keeping.

"April was a shocker," said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac. "I would have bet on a dip because March foreclosures were so high."

Instead, filings inched up 1% from March and rose 32% compared to April 2008.

There were 63,900 bank repossessions, the last stop in the foreclosure process. More than 1.3 million homes have now been lost to foreclosure since the market meltdown began in August 2007.

The increasing foreclosures will force RealtyTrac to rethink its forecasts, according to Sharga. "We had been predicting 3.4 million filings for the year," he said, "but we'll blow those numbers out of the water."

Those are some enormous numbers, and they signify the sheer enormity of the crisis, but remember, for each foreclosure -- for each of the 63,900 repossessions, for each of the expected millions of foreclosures -- living, breathing human beings are involved. Real people -- individuals, families -- are losing their homes.

Yes, some people made some bad choices along the way, to be sure, and, to an extent, this crisis amounts to a correction, a necessary if painful correction, a sudden imposition of reality, the exposure and elimination of the unrealistic and unsustainable, but it cannot be denied that people, millions of them, are struggling and suffering to make ends meet, if they can make them meet at all, some without roofs over their heads.

And, when it comes to bad choices, what about the lenders themselves, the banks and other institutions that saw an opening for massive profiteering and took it, luring those without adequate means into mortgages they couldn't possibly afford, propagandizing about home ownership while bleeding their clients dry?

While these lenders are being bailed out, though, the people who have lost their homes are stuck, given the state of the economy, is a largely hopeless situation. What are they to do? Some will readjust and get through this, but the ongoing difficulties for many will continue to be overwhelming.

And there is much, much more to come.