Unintended consequences: “It was the second consecutive month that Maryland led the nation in [the rate of] foreclosure filings, RealtyTrac said.” While filings nationwide were down 7 percent from a year earlier, those in Maryland were up 13 percent. [Baltimore Business Journal] We’ve noted before that although liberal legislators in Annapolis imagined they were doing poorer homeowners a favor by making the state’s foreclosure process so slow, the results have included unusual delays in bounce-back from housing recessions and persistent neighborhood blight. That’s to say nothing of the entrenchment of non-paying occupants in luxury homes for years at a stretch. To quote another commentator’s words in our March item:
“Living rent-free in a $600,000 house is a ‘plight’ only in the sense that at some point you may have to stop.” [Arnold Kling on the Washington Post’s naive Prince George’s County foreclosure series; coverage of Maryland’s unusually lender-hostile foreclosure law at Overlawyered here, here, here, here, here, and here]
[cross-posted from Free State Notes]
4 Comments
Maryland legislators are following this closely and drawing the correct conclusions, right?
-mirthless laugh-
[…] enacted various legal changes to slow down foreclosures, and the unpleasant aftermath, a story told here. Why would a state want to go through a very similar wasteful, blight-encouraging exercise for […]
There’s one thing you can rely on in politics: The effect of a progressive policy will be the opposite of what they claim to be seeking.