With some competitive rankings and top-10 lists, it’s better to salute another contestant and come in second.
Just ask Miami.
Miami-Dade County residents are undoubtedly quite willing to hand over the city’s crown of thorns associated with being the nation’s foreclosure capital to another city.
Unfortunately, the new top-rung entry is Jacksonville, another Florida municipality.
Statistics recently released by the state’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research confirm that Jacksonville supplanted Miami last month as the urban locale with the highest foreclosure rate in the United States (cities with more than 200,000 residents).
The two cities simply flip-flopped in the rankings. Miami held that dubious distinction for the first six months of 2013.
Jacksonville took off in July, though, and in a decidedly negative way. In data culled from the research company RealtyTrac, foreclosures were noted as jumping by 19 percent in the city just from June to July. Moreover, one other telling and flatly dismal number emerged in the data, namely this: The rate of foreclosures in the Jacksonville area during July bucked the national trend by actually increasing from last year.
And, ominously, that spike was anything but modest, with researchers noting a 24 percent jump.
The state report notes some neutral to encouraging information, but it doesn’t mince words regarding a bottom line that is, overall, discouraging and that signals a strong need for material and prolonged improvement.
“[I]t will take a few more years to climb completely out of the hole left by the recession,” the report states.
According to the RealtyTrac-supplied data, Florida cities occupy every spot on the Top-10 list except one, with that municipality being Albuquerque.
Source: Jacksonville Daily Record, “Florida still leads US in foreclosures,” Mark Basch, Aug. 27, 2013
