[A-List] Foreclosures helping change color of some suburbs ?

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Foreclosures-helping-change-apf-3776738990.html?x=0&.v=1



Cheaper housing costs open suburbs up to lower income Detroit
residents, sowing conflict


This Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011 picture shows a previously opened bottle
of beer resting in the snow on the side of the road in the Detroit
suburb of Southfield, Mich. Many in the black middle class moved out
of Detroit and settled in the northern suburbs years ago; now, due to
foreclosures, it is easy to buy or rent houses on the cheap here. The
result has been a new, poorer wave of arrivals from the city, and
growing tensions between residents and the newcomers. (AP Photo/Carlos
Osorio)
Corey Williams, Associated Press, On Monday February 28, 2011, 12:02 am EST

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (AP) -- Three years ago, Lamar Grace left Detroit
for the suburb of Southfield. He got a good deal -- a
3,000-square-foot colonial that once was worth $220,000. In
foreclosure, he paid $109,000.

The neighbors were not pleased.

"They don't want to live next door to ghetto folks," he says.

That his neighbors are black, like Grace, is immaterial. Many in the
black middle class moved out of Detroit and settled in the northern
suburbs years ago; now, due to foreclosures, it is easy to buy or rent
houses on the cheap here. The result has been a new, poorer wave of
arrivals from the city, and growing tensions between established
residents and the newcomers.

"There's a way in which they look down on people moving in from
Detroit into houses they bought for much lower prices," says Grace, a
39-year-old telephone company analyst. "I understand you want to keep
out the riffraff, but it's not my fault you paid $250,000 and I paid a
buck."

The neighbors say there's more to it than that. People like John
Clanton, a retired auto worker, say the new arrivals have brought
behavior more common in the inner city -- increased trash, adults and
children on the streets at all times of the night, a disregard for
others' property.

"During the summer months, I sat in the garage and at 3 o'clock in the
morning you see them walking up and the down the streets on their cell
phones talking," Clanton says. "They pull up (in cars) in the middle
of the street, and they'll hold a conversation. You can't get in your
driveway. You blow the horn and they look back at you and keep on
talking. That's all Detroit."

The tensions have not gone unnoticed by local officials.

"I've got people of color who don't want people of color to move into
the city," says Southfield Police Chief Joseph Thomas, who is himself
black. "It's not a black-white thing. This is a black-black thing. My
six-figure blacks are very concerned about multiple-family,
economically depressed people moving into rental homes and apartments,
bringing in their bad behaviors."

For example, "They still think it's OK to play basketball at 3 o'clock
in the morning; it's OK to play football in the streets when there's a
car coming; it's OK to walk down the streets three abreast. That's
unacceptable in this city."

Thomas has seen the desperation of the new arrivals. His officers,
handling complaints, have found two or more families living in a
single house, pooling their money for rent. They have "no food in the
refrigerator and no furniture," Thomas says. "They can't afford the
food. They can't afford the furniture." But they were eager to flee
the gunfire of their old neighborhoods in Detroit.

The foreclosure crisis made it possible.

"We had a large number of people who have purchased homes from 2005
on, where the banks were very generous with their credit and they've
allowed for people without documentation and income verification to
borrow 95 to 100 percent of home values," Southfield Treasurer Irv
Lowenberg says. "Many purchased homes when they had two jobs in the
household and one of the jobs was lost.

"As values began dropping, people were looking around and saying 'Why
should I stay and pay my mortgage when other people aren't?' They
decided to hand the keys back to the bank."

Many of the foreclosed upon Southfield homes were going for $40,000 to
$60,000. The median home value dropped from more than $190,000 to
below $130,000 over the same period, according to Census figures.

With so many empty houses available, rents also dipped by hundreds of
dollars. Renters increased from about 13,100 in 2006 to 15,400 in
2009.

The lure of low prices to Detroiters was obvious -- as was the
likelihood that their arrival would not be without issues.

"Blacks, like all Americans, want good schools and a safe community,
and they can find that in the suburbs," says Richard Schragger, who
teaches local government and urban law at the University of Virginia.

Now, suburbs closest to big cities are "bedeviled" by the same
problems that helped spur urban flight decades ago, Schragger adds.
"And you're seeing further flight out. Rising crime levels, some
rising levels of disorder."

These were the things that prompted Richard Twiggs to leave Detroit 23
years ago for the safety, quiet and peace of mind Southfield offered.

"The reason suburbs are the way they are is because a certain element
can't afford to live in your community," adds Twiggs, a 54-year-old
printer. "If you have $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 homes you're
relatively secure in the fact that (the homeowners) are people who can
afford it.

"But when you have this crash, people who normally couldn't afford to
live in Southfield are moving in. When you have a house for $9,900 on
the corner over there -- that just destroys my property."

The pride that comes with home ownership and a large financial
investment in the property is missing, says Clanton, who lives across
the street from Twiggs on Stahelin, about a half-mile north of
Detroit. Back yards are deep and mostly tree-shaded. Sidewalks are
few.

"I treasure what I bought," Clanton says. "I want to keep it, but I
don't need somebody to come in and throw their garbage on mine. Why
would they come and make our lives miserable because they don't care?"

Though they acknowledge they would lose money by selling their current
homes, Clanton and Twiggs are contemplating moving further north.

Sheryll Cashin, who teaches constitutional law and race and American
law at Georgetown University, says it would be a shame if black flight
from the city set off black flight from the near suburbs.

Some blacks just don't want to live near other blacks, she says:
"There is classism within the black community. The foreclosure crisis
may be accelerating it." But she says middle-class blacks, like
middle-class whites, are also put off by behavior of impoverished
blacks who "have developed their own culture, one that is very
different from mainstream America."

Those who contemplate fleeing have fallen into what Cashin calls the
"black middle-class dilemma."

"You have a choice of whether you are willing to be around your people
or go 180 degrees in the other direction," she says. "To the higher
income black people, if you don't want to love and help your
lower-income black brethren, why would you expect white people to? If
you can't do it, no one in society can do it. You can try to flee or
you can be part of the solution."

Southfield officials say one solution to changing neighborhoods is
blight enforcement, other ordinances and costly fines. The idea, said
the police chief, Thomas, is not to chase people away, but to help
them assimilate.

Soon after Grace, the telephone company analyst, moved into his house,
he was cited for parking a small trailer on the property and storing
interior doors outside. These are things that would have drawn little
notice in Detroit amid the crime and failing schools, he said.

He paid $400 in fines, got rid of the doors and put the trailer in paid storage.

Eugene Williams found a foreclosure steal in one of Southfield's many
well-kempt and stable neighborhoods. Williams, like Grace, wanted to
get away from Detroit.

"The kids are running around without any control," says Williams, a
56-year-old auto plant worker. "They walk down the middle of the
street and block traffic. There was gunfire at night. It was a common
thing to hear gunfire."

But the transition to life in the suburbs hasn't been easy. As he was
making improvements indoors, Southfield ordinance officials were
writing citations outside. He was fined $200 for noxious weeds because
the grass was too high and dandelions covered much of the front lawn.

"It wouldn't happen in Detroit," he says. "Your property is pretty
much your property. I think, here, they are going a little overboard."