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Wright County to hold phone-in on foreclosure

The county, with the second-highest foreclosure rate in the state, hopes the seminar will help people deal with the crisis.

By HERÓN MÁRQUEZ ESTRADA, Star Tribune

Last update: October 9, 2008 - 11:22 PM

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QUESTIONS ABOUT FORECLOSURE?

What: A conference-call seminar sponsored by the Minnesota Home Ownership Center to answer questions on foreclosure: How to avoid it and how to get out of it.

When: 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday

To participate: Call 1-888-886-6603. The line can accommodate up to 20,000 callers.

More info: Go to www.hocmn.org/telephoneseminars.cfm

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For years, when times were better, people in Wright County thought nothing of driving 30 or more miles a day to jobs in Minneapolis or St. Paul.

Not only were gasoline prices lower, but often commuters could afford larger homes in Wright County than in the Twin Cites because of a housing boom that washed over the county.

Today, a combination of skyrocketing gas prices and collapsing housing prices have thousands of Wright County residents under water, victims of the second-highest foreclosure rate among all of Minnesota's counties.

"And I think things are going to get worse," said Julie Gurgin of the Minnesota Home Ownership Center.

On Wednesday, the center hopes to provide a lifeline to Wright County residents and others through a novel call-in seminar dealing with foreclosure.

The one-hour event, from 7 to 8 p.m., will provide advice from experts as callers phone in with questions about how to avoid foreclosure, how to deal with it once the process begins, and how to get out of foreclosure. The number to call is 1-888-886-6603.

"I think they are going to get a real good response," said Larry Howard, housing manager of Wright County Community Action Program, which has been working with Gurgin's group on the housing crisis.

During a test run of the phone-in process, hundreds of people participated, and the phone line can accommodate thousands of callers.

The Home Ownership Center, a nonprofit group based in St. Paul, also has been holding town hall meetings all over the state trying to educate people about foreclosure.

Gurgin said that from 2005 to 2007, there were more than 37,000 mortgage defaults in Minnesota. That number is expected to increase by another 28,000 this year, she said.

Last year, Wright County had more than 750 foreclosures. That number will climb close to 1,200 this year.

Its foreclosure rate per thousand households is topped only by Scott County, Gurgin said.

Last month, she went before the Wright County Board to warn that the situation shows no signs of stabilizing in Wright County and elsewhere.

"I would not be surprised if we saw similar numbers through 2009," she said.

Gurgin said her group started seeing housing problems in 2006 as the first big wave of the popular five-year adjustable rate mortgages that helped people in Wright and other counties get into more expensive homes started to adjust upward.

"A lot of the numbers that worked for some people at the beginning no longer worked," Gurgin said. "There were housing experts who forecast this. But the severity of it has taken some of us by surprise."

One of the surprises has been how severely the foreclosure crisis hit Wright County.

The problems were exacerbated in Wright because builders had rushed to meet the demand for more housing.

When the housing market collapsed there was a large inventory of unsold or unfinished homes in the county, housing experts said.

"There's a lot of [new] housing that has been for sale for a year or more and they can't sell them," Howard said.

He said high gas prices also have been especially painful in Wright because of the number of commuters in the county.

"They are spending a lot more money on gas right now. But it's also like a lot of other places. People are losing their jobs and that's causing a lot of the foreclosures in Wright County."

Heron Marquez Estrada • 612-673-4280

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