Tagged: Housing

Part of the Family Matters series

The Great Recession slammed into all age groups, flattening the career dreams of young people and squeezing the retirement accounts of middle-aged savers. It financially crippled many elderly people who had thought they could stand on their own.

To cope with the hard times that began five years ago, millions of families pulled together — stacking two, three, even four generations on top of one another. Between 2007 and 2009, the total number of Americans living in multigenerational households shot up more than 10 percent, from 46.5 million to 51.4 million.

In Florida, the foreclosure process takes 861 days, on average.

That means houses often sit in limbo for more than two years after the owner stops paying the mortgage. Maybe the homeowner is still living in the house. Maybe he's renting it out. Maybe squatters are living there, or maybe it's empty and falling down.

Marc Joseph's job is to find out.

Joseph is a real estate agent. On the day I tag along with him, he's representing a bank that had repossessed a concrete block home in Cape Coral, Fla.

"The assignment for this property came out auto-generated through the computer last night at, like, 2:01 in the morning," he said.

His assignment today is to figure out what condition the house is in and report back to the bank.

Cleveland resident Cedric Cowan was asleep on an overcast spring morning when the roaring sounds of splintering wood and falling rubble jolted him awake.

Cowan lives in a neighborhood hit hard by foreclosures. He initially thought someone was moving into the house on the other side of Fairport Avenue.

Instead, he woke that morning to find a crew tearing down the two-family house.

Over the course of three hours, an excavator smashed, crushed and ripped apart the abandoned house while a worker sprayed the rubble with a hose to keep the dust down.

Cowan says he can't help but feel relief. He's been watching people moving into vacant houses, he says — and he doesn't like it.

Meet Willow Tufano, age 14: Lady Gaga fan, animal lover, landlord.

In 2005, when Willow was 7, the housing market was booming. Home prices in some Florida neighborhoods nearly doubled from one month to the next. Her family moved into a big house; her mom became a real estate agent.

But as Willow moved from childhood to adolescence, the market turned, and the neighborhood emptied out. "Everyone is getting foreclosed on here," she says.

After the collapse, Willow's mom started working with investors who wanted to bid on cheap, foreclosed homes. Sometimes Willow tagged along.

Not everyone wants to buy a mold-infested foreclosure, but Dan Grohs does.

He and his Realtor are walking through a three-bedroom house in Minneapolis. The copper pipes have been stolen by vandals and the heat doesn't work, but Grohs recently bid on the house — and he sees potential.

"It's got a nice flow to it," Grohs says as he moves through the home. "You walk in — living room, dining room, kitchen. Good spacious rooms."

The bank that owns this foreclosure wants about $48,000 for it, but Grohs has offered $40,000 in cash. If the deal goes through, he plans to renovate the house and resell it. That's how he and his brothers make a living, and Grohs says they've probably made more than 500 cash deals over three decades.