A Ten Year Struggle with the U.S. Housing Crisis

More than a decade after the housing crisis first hit, journalist Ryan Dezember looks back at his experience with selling his southern-Alabama home for the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the increasingly high home prices in many of today’s U.S. markets, there are still about 2.5 million American homes worth less than their mortgage debt, according to CoreLogic. Dezember, who was finally able to sell his home in 2017, took a $25,500 loss after years of ups and downs in his neighborhood’s economic recovery.

[In 2013] I opened a letter and learned that county tax assessors had valued my property at $52,200, less than half what I owed the bank, and less than half what my insurance company deemed the house to be worth.

Seven years after the U.S. housing market collapsed, at a time when millions of others had put the economic calamity behind them, I was still stuck. The house I owned would be twice as valuable on fire than on the market.

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