North County Neighborhoods Hit Hard By Foreclosures

OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- The telltale signs of foreclosed houses, such as brown lawns and discarded furniture in driveways, are sweeping through some North County neighborhoods, and almost a third of the houses on one Oceanside street have been foreclosed by banks, it was reported Sunday.

One in 17 houses in Oceanside's 92057 zip code, next to Camp Pendleton's back gate, is in foreclosure. To the east, in the suburb of Murrieta, it's worse, with one out of every nine homes in foreclosure.

The nation's credit crisis has come home to neighborhoods in North San Diego County and southern Riverside County, the North County Times reports, where experts label the mortgage crisis "a pandemic."

The newspaper's analysis of the housing market in northern San Diego, and southern Riverside counties, shows that half of the area's home sales in December were foreclosures, and that for every one repossessed house that was sold by a bank, another four or five are lined up in the process of foreclosure.

The newspaper also found that the foreclosure pattern in San Diego County is hyperlocal, with some streets badly affected and others not so much.

Upside-down homeowners, who owe more than they can sell as prices plummet, are the rule for those facing foreclosure, the paper said. Many are in trouble because they invested in other houses as investments, in places like Arizona, the newspaper said.