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Title
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Analysis of Foreclosures and Tax Liens in Mt. Hope
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Date
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2023
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Description
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Student presentation analyzing the foreclosures and tax sales of Mt. Hope between 2009 and 2023, from AFRI1075 course: Providence Housing Ecosystem: Development, Displacement, and Gentrification and the Root Shock PowerPoint presentation.
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Format
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mp4
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Language
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English
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Contributor
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Keiley Thompson, Lillian Bernstein, Samuel Lynch, Victoria Von Redden, Sydney Rosant, Toby Arment
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transcript of
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Speaker 1 [00:00,000 - 03:17,000]: So, now we'll quickly move into our actual analysis of trends in foreclosures in Providence and the Mount Hope neighborhood and in tax sales. So, just to run through our data collection and methodology really quick, for foreclosures, we used recorded notices of intent and notices of foreclosure between 2009 and 2023. Earlier years were not available digitally, and then at least between 2000 and 2004 and 2004 to 2005, we couldn't find listed addresses that we could easily export to a spreadsheet and try to measure trends. We got this data from the Providence Recorder of Deeds and their digital land use records. The variables include document information, the address of the property being foreclosed on or with a notice, the number of units, the borrower's name, and the date recorded. Using this data, we look at the trends in recorded notices of foreclosure and intent to foreclose in Providence in this time period, trends in recorded notices in Mount Hope, and the share of Providence notices that had Mount Hope addresses in this time period. Similarly, for tax sales, we look at recorded tax sale properties between 2016 and 2022. Earlier years were not available on the tax collector website. We currently have sent in a request for these years but have yet to hear back from the collector. The data includes the address and the number of units and also the year that the sale was recorded. So, these are basically a list of addresses that are going up for sale, which usually happens in June or May of each year. And then we look at trends in tax sales in Providence, trends in Mount Hope, and then the share of Providence tax sales with Mount Hope addresses. And then more importantly, we want to talk about our data limitations here. So, starting with foreclosures, we don't have information on whether the property is residential, commercial, and/or owner-occupied. 74 records are missing addresses, but we don't really think this should lead to a lot of bias considering our sample has 8,300 lines of data. Also, it's important to note that notices of intent and foreclosure do not always lead to foreclosure. They can often lead to these mediation conferences, which can lead to a refinancing of the loan, or they can lead to other forms of foreclosure. Our data also excludes illegal foreclosures and other legal foreclosures that don't require notice of intent or a notice of foreclosure. Also, this data excludes race and other demographic information, and same with the tax sales. And although the purpose of this is to study the history and ongoing capital extraction and dispossession of housing in predominantly Black communities, we felt like our demographic analysis that Toby did would be a good indicator of the general demographics of this area of the Mount Hope neighborhood. The tax sale also doesn't specify what type of property it is. It also doesn't specify whether the property was redeemed or acquired by Rhode Island Housing. Only one record was missing an address. We were also missing 2017 tax data as this wasn't digitized. And it doesn't specify what the type of tax sale was or if the sale led to a foreclosure or repossession. It also excludes race and other demographic information.
Speaker 2 [03:17,000 - 03:30,000]: We have five minutes, so we should be, you know, so that we can have any other last two minutes for questions. So, what can you do for us so we can, I know there's a lot still to present, and I'll shut up.
Speaker 1 [03:30,000 - 05:41,000]: Okay. I'll show my graphs very quickly, though. But just before I show them, I wanted to say, given these limitations, ultimately the data fails to capture actual foreclosures and tax sales that lead to displacement. So, in this way, our analysis works as an indicator of financial instability in the Mount Hope neighborhood. So, as you can see in trends in foreclosures, since 2009, foreclosures have been trending down, likely because of the recovery of the banking crisis and the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which ultimately reduced the number of foreclosures. Although when we look at the number of foreclosures in Mount Hope over this period, we do see more of a spike in 2018. And then when we look at the share of foreclosure notices in Mount Hope, we can see that although they were declining between 2016 and 2023, the number of foreclosures in Mount Hope, the share of foreclosures in Providence that happened in Mount Hope were increasing over this time period. So, this might indicate other kind of things that were happening, maybe predatory lending that was specifically targeted at this neighborhood. Two other key findings were, in the entire sample period, of the 35 multi-family properties that were foreclosed on or issued a notice of intent, 100% were in the Mount Hope neighborhood. Also, in 2018, Mount Hope made up roughly 3% of the population of Providence, while 7% of the notices were filed within Mount Hope. And then moving into tax sales, we also see a similar declining trend between 2016 and 2023 in tax sales in Providence and in Mount Hope. Although as we can see after 2019, tax sales in the Mount Hope neighborhood are increasing slightly more than in Providence as a whole. And then when we look in the share of tax sale notices in Providence that had Mount Hope addresses, we can see over this period of time, they increased quite significantly from about 1% to 3% between 2019 and 2022. And Millie, I know you had some more to add to this, so...
Speaker 3 [05:41,000 - 05:45,000]: It's okay. We can just keep moving forward because I know we're out of time.
Speaker 1 [05:45,000 - 05:46,000]: Okay.
Speaker 3 [05:46,000 - 07:53,000]: Yeah, so this was basically, like, recommendations for how we can collect foreclosure data in the future, because a lot of the foreclosure information was directly from City Hall and very inaccessible for a lot of people considering their hours and just the many books that you had to look through. So, we were just suggesting something similar to what Connecticut does, where it basically just shows and filters out the month, the year, the county of the state, the type of home, and then just shows the number of foreclosures. So, it's something very simple that somebody can look at, something like that, yeah. And then this kind of gives a point of comparison showing how the city of Providence records its foreclosure data and how you can access it. So, you'd have to go through some complex searches and you'd basically have to, in order to get the address of each home that was possibly foreclosed, you have to press into each individual document and then you'd have to cross-link and try and find where that could be located, things like that. So, we're just recommending something that would be more simple that would basically just show the county and or like the neighborhood of Providence and then just the number of foreclosures depending on the date. And then for our continuation of research, we realized that we weren't able to get to the in-person research of the foreclosure records in City Hall as much. So, if we were to continue research, we would want to do that and find the individual names and addresses from those books. We had a purely quantitative research, basically, so we would probably want to implement some qualitative data, some stories, something that's more personable to our data so that we're not just painting one specific numeral data of our research. And then finally, we'd probably want to explore foreclosure data in other neighborhoods of Providence to kind of give it a point of comparison and contextualize what we found about Mount Hope foreclosures.
