Things the Globe could do a good job reporting on, but for some reason doesn’t: Violent crime in minority neighborhoods. The turnpike authority. The state budget. The MBTA. And this weekend, the regional housing market.
Yesterday’s Real Estate section covered the Route 2 corridor in central MA and described it as “a crisis,” but failed to make a case for why it’s different from the housing disaster to the south, east, or north. Their justification:
“Lawrence and Brockton have higher rates of foreclosures. But people here said the real estate market’s collapse in northern Worcester County has been especially devastating because of the area’s relative economic isolation, compared to cities closer to Boston’s transportation networks and urban core.”
In Lawrence, the foreclosure rate is nearly double that of even the most hard-hit areas in the Route 2 West corridor. You want to write about a housing crisis, and you ignore Lawrence? Is that more of a Herald town or something?
They also said that “In 2006, for example, the Fitchburg-Leominster region had the seventh-highest number of subprime mortgages in the nation, 187, that went delinquent just three months after the borrowers closed on their loans, a Mortgage Bankers Association study released last year found.” That’s less an indication of a financial crisis than an indication of financial fraud. I know it’s possible for legitimate 30-year loans to go sour after just a couple months, but when so many of them do, you start looking for falsely inflated assets and corrupt brokers who illegally pushed people into loans they didn’t understand and couldn’t afford. Does the article cover fraud? No, it does not.
Secretly Ironic 