More Chicago-area homeowners defaulted on their mortgages during the final three
months of 2009 than in any other quarter since the housing crisis began in 2006.

The year-end figures, scheduled to be released Thursday by the Woodstock Institute,
paint a picture of a local housing market brutalized by foreclosures over the past three
years. Last year, more than 70,000 homeowners in the six-county area, including 24,053
in the fourth quarter alone, received initial notices of mortgage defaults, the first step in
the foreclosure process, and those defaults increasingly were in more affluent
neighborhoods, the report showed.

What the data doesn't show, but what is widely predicted, is that there will be no
slowdown in foreclosures this year. Despite almost yearlong efforts to stem the tide
of foreclosures, high unemployment rates are causing more homeowners to miss
mortgage payments. Some observers expect both the number of people in foreclosure
and the number of vacant properties on the market to increase as consumers fall out
of loan mitigation programs and lenders release their foreclosure inventory onto the
real estate market.



http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,5719250.story