9422580 LAURIA Individual home ownership has generally been held as a positive goal for society and the macroeconomy, as evidenced by the range of public policies encouraging home ownership in the US. Home ownership is not only an additive process, as some households lose possession of their homes. The most dramatic end to home ownership is the foreclosure of property. Current academic and policy discussions of residential foreclosure have the unfortunate context of under-conceptualization of the issue and a lack of empirical information about the correlates of foreclosure. We have little theoretical or empirical knowledge concerning the effect of housing foreclosure on home ownership rates, neighborhood conditions and stability, and the spatial structure of the city. The proposed research uses a range of available theoretical and empirical background to develop a set of hypotheses about: the economic and neighborhood (social and institutional) determinants of foreclosure rates; the institutional and economic determinants of the socio-economic results of homeowner foreclosure; and the effects of foreclosure on the physical form of the city (distribution of households by age, size, and income; residential versus non-residential land uses). The empirical study will be conducted on foreclosure activity and aftermath in New Orleans during and since the late 1980s. Data on foreclosures will come from court records. Data on socio-economic characteristics of foreclosees and purchasers will be collected via household survey. Data on neighborhood characteristics will come from the US Census. The ultimate purpose of the research is to enable municipal governments to predict the effects of changed rates of foreclosure (depending in part on the macroeconomic and institutional reasons for changes in those rates), and to enable governments at all levels to reduce the rates and the negative effects of homeowner foreclosure.
