ABSTRACT

Unsustainable loan products and mortgage fraud led to a wave of foreclosures that caught everyone off-guard, including builders, developers, and local governments. Initially, foreclosures were confined to mostly urban core of the Atlanta region, where predatory lending and mortgage fraud were much more prevalent. One thought among industry experts at the time was that Atlanta was immune to a housing bubble because of the relative stability of home prices. Driven by activity in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia ranked fourth nationally in overall foreclosure activity, and the Atlanta metropolitan region had the third largest rate of real estate owned inventory as of September 2011, behind only Detroit and Las Vegas. The Neighborhood Stabilization Program was administered by Housing and Urban Development and signed into law in 2008 as part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act. The foreclosures that occurred were largely due to fraudulent activity and unsustainable mortgage products. The outside the perimeter neighborhoods were in the second wave of foreclosures.