There’s an old joke about Chicago being a large city at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Chicago and the Chicagoland area are underwater in another way:
The percentage of Chicago-area home borrowers “underwater†on their mortgages fell in the first quarter but is among the highest in the country, according to Zillow.
In the Chicago area, 23.7 percent of homeowners with a mortgage were underwater during the quarter, according to data Zillow released today. While that was down from 28.1 percent in first-quarter 2014, it was the second-highest proportion of underwater homes among the 35 largest U.S. housing markets. Las Vegas was highest at 25 percent.
Chicago does have the nation’s biggest number of underwater loans—413,690—with New York a distant second at 307,573.
Chicago never experience the rapid run-up in house prices that Las Vegas and New York did but prices did fall. six years after the start of the recovery we’re still suffering from it. No wonder the state legislature thinks this is a good time to raise property taxes.
I guess I should look at the bright side. If the number of home mortgages that are underwater were lower, the net outmigration from the state would probably have been even higher.
