Looks like a correlation between sunshine and mortgage absurdity. When will people learn that these sunny hellholes just aren’t meant to be centers of human civilization? Note that some of the very worst sites blighting American culture, Vegas and Hollywood and Disneyland and Disneyworld, are located in these states. Lots of other shit piles concentrated in there too, like just name most any city. The country would be better if we just gave up on these hopeless wastelands and burned them to the ground. Then the rest of the country could get on with recovery of the economy and of most everything else.

But where does the national average stand relative to where it normally is? This graph doesn't really say.

How does the foreclosure level in, say, New York compare to a decade ago?

What Der Bruno said. Comparing Q4 2008 foreclosure rates with the national average for 2008 is not exactly revelatory. Even comparing 2008 rates with 2007 rates would yield more useful information.

My state, Georgia, is deep blue but I know that foreclosures here are way above average. The Atlanta metro area has the 3rd highest percentage of unoccupied homes after all. I often read the Atlanta legal paper where all the foreclosure notices go. This paper used to have one section with half notices and half legal news. Now the paper publishes 3-4 sections daily with only half a section for legal news and the rest are all foreclosure notices. From my unscientific study I conclude that if Georgia has a drastically above average foreclosure rate, then California might be close to a big state of squatters and feral dogs.

I think that looking at this by state is misleading. I don't know the numbers in the post-crash world, but back in 2000 and 2001 when I was working with urban activists groups foreclosures were something we were following very closely. Back then Detroit had the highest foreclosure rate of any municipality, and certain ZIP codes here in Indianapolis were besting their best.

So I think you're right to look for the effects of concentration, but not at the state level. The problem with the foreclosure rate in Arizona, for example, is not that Arizona has a lot of foreclosures. It's that a substantially large portion of them are in Tucson.

We also really need a median rather than a mean, because otherwise we're doing the "Citibank walks into a bar, and suddenly everyone there is insolvent" thing.

And the way eight states bring down the economy is that the foreclosed assets were heavily leveraged...

And exactly how do you get such leverage? Not from lenders that would have to be responsible for the loan after it is written.
Nope, the government secondary market drove the requirements and, as usual, politics encroached to achieve a short-term political objective.

And now we have the economic meltdown. When will we ever learn?

What we had is less a foreclosure problem...

Um, what we have is a foreclosure problem... not "had"; I'd second much of the criticisms of data here, and add that even if you go with the "FL, CA, AZ, NV" (I believe the word is "outliers") focus, you still have Idaho, Colorado and Utah above the national (state) average. That says to me that the problem is at least growing, and bigger than a contained, 4 state problem... or solution. The larger point is... we are nowhere near the end of the foreclosure crisis, so where we are now doesn't tell us very much... and it's a bad way to craft a solution to think "here, and no further." The point is that some of these places don't have a foreclosure mess... yet.

So what if the analysis is sloppy. I like the image of squatters and feral dogs.

Maricopa County, Arizona goes all the way down to the Mexico border. I never lived there, but travelled through on my way to work on a condo development in Mexico from 2001 through 2006. During those years thousands of homes went up around Maricopa, AZ (twenty miles south of Phoenix). The land is uninhabitable desert. The road we took through there was nicknamed "dead cow road" because of the dead cows you could see along the side of the road as you drove through. These were not cheap homes from what I could see either, but only crazy people would want to live there.

What Der Bruno and all the other critics of the data said.

post-crash dystopias inhabited mainly by squatters and feral dogs

and lots of conservative wingnuts too! (cause/effect?)

Nice map, but seems kind of shakey on data. Percentages of total homes in foreclosure during the year would be more helpful, state by state.

Could we call this map "The Death of Federalism"?

Letting states draw up their own policies that lead to the ruin of the entire world is kind of silly.

As part of a response to what others have noted here, I'd like to see a more-granular map that drills down to the ZIP-code level, *and* sizes ZIP codes proportional to their population. This sequence of maps of electoral results points the way: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

this is a nice map, as far as it goes, but i agree with the others that the data is limited in how its presented. it's also (unfortunately) already somewhat out of date. last week senator merkley told blue oregon that oregon is now ranked fifth in the country as far as foreclosure rates go. you'd think from that map that we were doing just fine.

The real issue is dollar losses, which are overwhelmingly concentrated in the four Sand States. From Lucy and Herlitz's paper:

"In fact, 66 percent of potential housing losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, for a total of 87 percent of national declines in these four states.”

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