Move Over Katrina

Bankers and other financial shysters have decimated acres upon acres, miles upon miles of the US landscape.

All due respect of course to the people of New Orleans and the surrounding hurricane area....

Huffington Post has posted photos of the foreclosure destruction orchestrated by the banks: Shocking Aerial Images of the Foreclosure Crisis  And, as much as the HuffPost reports widely on the subject, they missed poor Detroit, where the crisis is so bad, very few can even stomach talking about it or looking at it. You can see some of it here.

The images are captioned with the following shocking statistics:

1. Nearly one in every 100 homes in Las Vegas is going through some stage of the foreclosure process, which is the highest rate in America. At the same time, one in every 19 Vegas homes is facing the possibility of a mortgage default.
2. In late 2008, developers halted the construction of a 750-home housing in Rio Vista, as the town teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. And in March 2009, the San Fransisco Chronicle declared that the American dream was over for Rio Vista homeowners, as over 7,000 local families were left without homes in 2008.
3. Cape Coral was one of the first master-planned communities, and is the most-populated city in Southwest Florida. It also has the third highest rate of foreclosures in the U.S, according to RealtyTrac, with one in 104 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing.
4. Laguna Woods, an area in Orange County, is notoriously known for being the largest U.S. county to go bankrupt. The foreclosure rate in Orange County varies widely. It is as low as one in 1083 houses in certain towns and as high as one in 144 houses in other towns.

NJS adds that in Orange County, many homebuyers were pushed into faulty mortgages by the God=financial reward megachurches. See "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?: America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong."

Read more and see the images

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