For a long time, we’ve been hearing about how the housing market in Colorado isn’t as bad as in the rest of the country, and there’s some truth to it. We’re routinely at or near the top of the Case-Shiller index, and foreclosures have tended to lag behind the rest of the country. But there may be some serious trouble on the horizon. According to a study in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, almost 25% of US mortgages are underwater. That’s not 25% of homeowners, since those without mortgages by definition aren’t underwater, but it’s still a pretty serious number.
Colorado does not fare particularly well in this survey. While the national average is 23%, 19% of Colorado mortgages are underwater, good for 11th in the country. An additional 7.8% of Colorado’s mortgages are with 5% of being underwater, 2nd-worst in the country. With a loan-to-value ratio of 72%, Colorado is 9th-worst in the country. (The worst in that category is Harry Reid’s own Nevada with a staggering 114% loan-to-value ratio, 23 percentage points worse than 2nd-place Arizona.)
So obviously, Gov. Ritter, the legislature, and the state Supreme Court thing that the right thing to do is to raise property taxes on these homeowners who are already going to have cash flow problems.
