“They need to answer this: What are they going to do for all the people losing their homes?’’ said Cruz, a part-time administrative aide who struggles to pay a mortgage on a home now worth less than half its $309,000 price six years ago. “They haven’t said anything.’’
If there is a poster child for the excesses of the US housing boom and bust, Florida is it. The state’s home prices have plunged 50 percent from their peak five or six years ago. Nearly half of Florida homeowners are underwater on their mortgages. Foreclosures and bankruptcies have soared.
Chief rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich do not appear to offer much comfort to people in this plight. The candidates share the same general solution: Get government out of the process and let the free market work. When the topic is broached on the trail, each candidate uses it as an opening to ridicule the other’s ties to government’s role in the housing sector.
As the politics intensify, thousands of homeowners face the threat of foreclosure. The pain is felt all along the Interstate 4 corridor, a politically powerful belt that runs from Tampa on the Gulf of Mexico to Daytona Beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The experience of St. Cloud, an Orlando suburb not far from Disney World, is typical.
More than 730 homes in St. Cloud were listed last year as so-called “short sales,’’ involving homeowners who hope to quickly unload property they can no longer afford, even at a substantial loss. Another 422 homes were repossessed by lenders.
Even those numbers do not reveal the full extent of the housing turmoil: Hundreds of other homes along the I-4 corridor, including many in Osceola County, are part of a shadow inventory of foreclosed homes that banks are withholding from the market.
Florida’s housing has shown little sign of recovering as the nation begins to shrug off the effects of recession. Unemployment remains higher than the rest of the nation, which is exerting a drag on home prices.
