Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

[Slimprofits]

CNNMoney / Fortune 01/10/08

Allstate spokesman Mike Siemienas says his company has seen an increase nationally in arsons among homes in foreclosure. In California, the state¹s insurance division reports that the number of questionable residential fires in 2007 increased 76 percent over 2006.

National arson statistics for 2007 aren't yet available, but Federal Bureau of Investigation crime data shows there was a significant uptick - 4 percent - in suburban arson in 2006, when the real estate downturn began to take hold. The arson increase in 2006 marked a change from the prior three years when suburban arson fell 3 percent, 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

[Jay]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

It's only anecdotal, but I was just talking to a paramedic 48 hours ago from the Fallriver, MA area and he was noting the high rate of arson in that city over the last few months. The housing market has been especially bad there.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

It's only anecdotal, but I was just talking to a paramedic 48 hours ago from the Fallriver, MA area and he was noting the high rate of arson in that city over the last few months. The housing market has been especially bad there.

I used to work in Brockton quite often and am not surprised to hear that. The whole area is depressed. There is no money coming in at all. The people are banking on casinos to save them.

[Jay]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

Ah, Brockton, I used to work there too. Surprised that whole town isn't on fire yet!

[FRED]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

Ah, Brockton, I used to work there too. Surprised that whole town isn't on fire yet!

iTulip News June 12, 2006:

Torch My Ride: Arson for Hire
Debt-weary SUV owners unload their gas-guzzlers on insurance companies
June 12, 2006 (Edmunds.com)

SUV owners who are faced with rising gas prices have found a new way to get out from under their high car payments — arson.

This trend was spotted by a Southern California arson task force in the summer of 2005 when gas prices spiked. At one point, firefighters responding to a report of a vehicle fire arrived at the Los Angeles River Bed to find two SUVs burning at the same time.

AntiSpin: Next: Houses.

[grapejelly]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

"Walkaways" are very common...people walk away from their house and leave it vacant. No title changes so they are still the owners but they don't care. The result predictably is a systematic looting of valuables in the house including copper pipes and appliances, and of course the fires.

[bill]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

make a movie?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_Weapon_3

The housing development under construction was an abandoned construction project in Lancaster, CA that succumbed to the housing market bust of the early 1990s. The city allowed the film company to film when they agreed to demolish it when finished.

[Rajiv]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

Texas Supreme Court Judge Charged In Arson Case

A Texas Supreme Court judge was charged Thursday in an arson case.

David Medina was charged with tampering with evidence.

His wife, Francisca, was charged in setting the fire that destroyed their house in Houston.

Further

Indictments tossed against Texas Supreme Court justice, wife

The Harris County District Attorney's office this morning dismissed the indictments returned Thursday against Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina and his wife in connection with the fire that destroyed their home in Spring last summer.

A grand jury handed up the indictments despite objections from Rosenthal's office. Today, the district attorney's office said it would continue to investigate the fire in relationship to the Medinas but not in a prosecutorial mode.

In a rare move for a body that typically operates in secrecy, two grand jury members Thursday night publicly denounced Rosenthal's unwillingness to prosecute as politically motivated.

Rosenthal insisted there is not sufficient evidence to charge the Medinas with involvement in what arson investigators determined was a deliberately set fire. The blaze caused almost $1 million worth of damage to three homes in the Olde Oaks neighborhood in Spring.

The story continues

Grand jury foreman irate in Supreme Court justice arson case

In a case some say reveals political backscratching at the courthouse, a Texas Supreme Court justice saw his arson-related indictment thrown out Friday at the request of a scandal-plagued, but fellow Republican, prosecutor.

The move outraged the grand jury foreman, who threatened to reconvene the panel and issue the charges again.

State District Judge Brian Rains dismissed the indictment handed up Thursday against Justice David Medina and his wife related to a fire last summer that burned down their suburban Houston house and damaged a neighbor's. The Medinas were in serious financial trouble.

The decision came a day after Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said evidence against the couple wasn't sufficient to support the charges.

Medina, also a Republican appointed by Gov. Rick Perry to the state's highest civil court in 2004 and elected to a full term two years later, was charged with evidence tampering. Medina's wife, Francisca, was charged with arson in the June 28 blaze that left nearly $1 million in damages.

"The assistant D.A. was either told or had second thoughts and decided it should go away," an angry grand jury foreman, Robert Ryan, said Friday. "One could speculate it was political pressure. I could see no other reason.

"It depends on who your friends are."

[GRG55]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

Texas Supreme Court Judge Charged In Arson Case



Further

Indictments tossed against Texas Supreme Court justice, wife



The story continues

Grand jury foreman irate in Supreme Court justice arson case

A friend of mine who is a policeman once told me that the best indicator of a self-torched building is whether the pets survived. He said that if the dog, cat and budgie didn't make it, they're pretty sure the owners didn't do it. ;)

[Rajiv]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

From the previously linked articles

He acknowledged that at the time of the fire his homeowner's insurance had lapsed and he was $2,000 behind on his homeowners association dues. Last year the house went into foreclosure proceedings that he said were later resolved.

He said the potential foreclosure — which fire investigators called a "red flag" that could indicate motive for arson — was the result of "miscommunication" with the bank he used at the time.

"As soon as it was brought to my attention, I took care of it," Medina said. "I'm not a wealthy man."

He said he was responsible for paying the homeowner's insurance and blamed the unpaid premiums on "not recalling exactly how I set up that policy and my automobile policy."

Medina said the mortgage insurance company paid off the house note.

[GRG55]

Re: Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?

CNNMoney / Fortune 01/10/08

Nothing's changed...

Arson Surges Across U.S. for Foreclosed Homes Lost to Subprime

By Kathleen M. Howley
July 3 (Bloomberg) -- At 10:40 p.m. on April 27, a blaze at the beige Victorian house at 19 Nye St. lit up a neighborhood littered with boarded-up homes on the north side of New Bedford, Massachusetts. It left charred wood and melted vinyl siding on the three-story structure.

The house had been abandoned after the owner defaulted on a $240,000 home loan from GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, a Novato, California lender that shut down in August, 2007. The fire was one of four suspicious blazes in foreclosed properties that month in the southern Massachusetts city. All are under investigation.

The biggest surge of mortgage defaults in seven decades coincides with an increase in blazes in foreclosed properties led by states with the most repossessed homes, according to fire safety officials in Nevada, Massachusetts and Ohio.

``The more empty houses we have, the more fires we are going to see,'' said James Wright, chief of the Nevada State Fire Marshal Division in Carson City, the state's capital. ``It's particularly dangerous for firefighters, because they don't know what condition these buildings are in or what they might find in them.''

National arson statistics for 2007, due in September or October, probably will show a significant increase as foreclosures climbed toward an all-time high in 2008's first-quarter, said James Quiggle, a spokesman for the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud in Washington.

Arsons Follow Foreclosures
``Home arsons follow foreclosure trends, with a lag,'' Quiggle said, pointing to an increase after the last housing slump when the number of blazes reached 116,600 in 1992 from 111,900 in 1990. ``We're facing a potential spike in arson like we've never seen before.''

The most recent data is from 2006, when the median price of a U.S. home reached an all-time high of $221,900, as measured by the National Association of Realtors. There were 31,000 arsons that year, compared with 31,500 in 2005, according to the U.S. Fire Administration in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Last year, fires in vacant Nevada buildings increased 4 percent from a year earlier, said Wright, the fire marshal. That number may grow, he said. The state had the worst foreclosure rate in the U.S. during the first quarter, with one filing for every 54 households, according to data compiled by RealtyTrac Inc. The national rate was one filing per 194 households, analysts at the Irvine, California company said.

Empty Buildings
In Ohio, where one of every 161 households had a foreclosure filing during the first quarter, the number of blazes in vacant buildings rose 18 percent in 2006, according to the latest figures compiled by the state's Division of State Fire Marshal in Reynoldsburg. Damages climbed 52 percent to $22.7 million from a year earlier in the state where home sales began tumbling in 2004's second half, a year before the national decline began.

The value of homes owned by U.S. banks more than doubled to $8.6 billion in the first quarter of 2008 from $3.59 billion a year earlier as lenders repossessed homes in default, data compiled by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in Washington show.

``Empty buildings have more fires and more serious fires than occupied buildings,'' said Steven Westermann, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Fairfax, Virginia. ``There's no one around to sound an alarm.''

Fringes of Society
Nationally, there were 396,000 home fires of all types that were reported in 2006, the highest in 10 years, according to the latest data available from the National Fire Protection Association in Quincy, Massachusetts. They caused a record $6.83 billion of damage.

Almost two-thirds of fires that occur in unsecured vacant buildings are intentionally set, said John Hall, head of research at the National Fire Protection Association. The rate drops to 32 percent in empty buildings protected with locks or boarded windows and 7 percent in occupied homes, he said.

In New Bedford, where the Nye Street home was boarded up, the city has posted signs on the charred building that read: ``Reward of up to $5,000 if you know who did this.'' So far, there are no leads.

The house has been empty since the subprime mortgage defaulted in August 2007, the same month the lender, GreenPoint Mortgage, went out of business after selling the loan to investors in a mortgage-backed security called BS ABS 2004-AC5 2300, according to documents at the Bristol County Registry of Deeds.

``For every foreclosure, you have more empty homes and more people who may become homeless,'' said Hall, of the National Fire Protection Association. ``These properties are on the fringe of society's attention.''
The growing number of vacant buildings, however, has not escaped the attention of firefighting officials. Flint, Michigan, put out a June 2007 study that called vacant-building fires ``a dangerous exercise in futility.'' Blazes in empty structures such as foreclosed homes account for 40 percent of the city's fires and 62 percent of its firefighter injuries, Fire Captain Andy Graves said in the report.

Nationally, there are 3.7 firefighter injuries per 100 blazes in vacant buildings, compared with 1.9 injuries per 100 fires overall, Graves said in the report.

Injured Firefighters
``We lose a lot of firefighters in vacant structures,'' said Westermann of the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

Firefighter Mark Reed knows how dangerous a vacant, foreclosed property can be. He was critically injured battling a June 2007 fire in Buffalo, New York, set by arsonists in a foreclosed home on the city's east side. Bricks from the chimney crushed Reed, who was then 36. His mangled right leg later was amputated.

``Every vacant home that's allowed to deteriorate becomes a danger to firefighters because they can't just sit back and say `Let it burn,''' said Barbara Reed, Mark's mother. Her only child lost his senses of smell and taste as a result of his brain injuries, and still goes to physical therapy twice a week, she said.

Foreclosures in Buffalo
When the chimney fell on Reed, he was standing between the burning building and the home next to it, trying to protect lives and property, his mother said. The other members of Reed's company, Engine 31, dug him out from under the bricks, she said.

``Even if the bank doesn't care enough to maintain a home and keep it from being a hazard, firefighters still have to answer the call to go and put out any fires that might come from their negligence,'' the retired fourth-grade teacher said.

Buffalo had 677 foreclosure filings in the first quarter, including notices of default and auctions, RealtyTrac reported. Since last year's accident, firefighters have begun inspecting and marking the city's 10,000 vacant houses with ``their own form of graffiti,'' said Reed. They use red spray paint on the doors or front walls of the buildings to cite potential dangers, she said.

``Structurally, we're talking about a massive amount of heavy plaster, bricks, and glass in every one of these houses,'' said Reed, 61. ``Buffalo is not the only city where firefighters are putting their lives on the line to take care of these homes that no one wants.''
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