Foreclosures

The building next to my own apartment building went through a couple of owners recently before being gutted and abandoned. Now what used to be a reasonably attractive place is a brick shell with a padlocked front door, yellow tape running around the front, and a X in a box painted on the facade that marks it as condemned. An article in the Post says the number of foreclosures in Brooklyn in the first quarter of 2008 is up by 26.6% from the same period last year. That sounds bad, until you see that the foreclosure rate is even higher in every other borough, reaching 101% in Staten Island. And that sounds bad, until you see that the increase in foreclosures for the country as a whole is 112%.