The Sand States

"The Sand States" is what Michael Barone, writing for the Washington Examiner, calls California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. They have much more severe problems with foreclosures than the other 46 states. Go see if your state is in the top ten list of foreclosures per state. Barone finds the difference between the four Sand States and the rest of the nation is astounding:

Together they contain 21% of the nation’s population but had 55% of the foreclosures.

In other words, purchasers in the Sand States were more than twice as likely to end up losing their homes to foreclosure. This was, as Barone notes, mostly because the housing bubble was much more exaggerated in those four states.

Barone makes an interesting argument for grading mortgage-backed securities on the basis of the percentage of Sand State mortgages they contain. Dare we conclude that the home financing crisis is not national but merely a local one in CA, AZ, NV, and FL?