A full recovery won't occur until at least 2030

By Ashley Powers and Alejandro Lazo, Los Angeles Times May 31, 2011

Reporting from North Las Vegas, Nev.? Charles Mills can barely afford to stay here. But he also can't afford to move.

That's why the 44-year-old heavy-equipment operator was preparing to leave his wife and young daughter here and go where he could find work ? the Oklahoma oil fields. Mills has a mortgage to pay, even if its size pains him.

He purchased his house in 2006 for $308,500. Current value: $105,797.

"We talked about it: What can we do with the house?" Mills said. "Nobody's going to buy it. Nobody's going to rent it. If we walk away, my credit's shot. We're stuck."

In some parts of North Las Vegas, more than 80% of homeowners have plunged "underwater," meaning they owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth ? a stunning concentration of aborted plans and upended lives.

Mobility in search of new opportunity has long been a cornerstone of the American economy, much the way homeownership has long offered a path to firmer financial footing. But the housing bust has left tens of thousands of homeowners across Nevada essentially trapped.

They're considered the new normal here. They turn down higher-paying jobs elsewhere because they can't move. They tidy the yards of houses left vacant by foreclosure. They realize it's unlikely their children will receive tidy inheritances from the sale of their suburban homes.

When they look about their neighborhood, they question things they never questioned before. Are dead plants a sign that someone forgot to water? Or did the water get turned off? Does a garage sale mean more neighbors are about to bail?

"We don't even walk around our own neighborhood anymore," Mills said. "Why? To say hi to strangers?"

Elsewhere on Midnight Breeze Street are Steve and Gay Shoaff, who once talked of selling their house and retiring somewhere pretty. Gay, 57, even toured a place in Wyoming.

But the Shoaffs have been living mostly off savings since the construction industry sputtered. Steve, 60, worked as a drywall taper and foreman.

"I'd say, 'Gay, we're going to become millionaires on this house,' " Steve recalled one day as he and his wife unwound in the backyard they'd spent thousands of dollars sprucing up. Gay mustered a smile.

Their $187,980 home is now assessed at $99,220.

"This house won't be worth what we paid on it until after we die," she said.

Some economists would agree, predicting that a full recovery in parts of the West's "foreclosure belt" ? California, Nevada and Arizona ? won't occur until at least 2030.

Nationwide, 23.1% of homeowners with mortgages are underwater. No state is more underwater than arid Nevada, with about two-thirds of borrowers holding such mortgages, according to CoreLogic, a Santa Ana research firm.

Some economists argue that, in a way, these homeowners are worse off financially than those who lost their houses through foreclosure and were forced to move on. Those borrowers often were able to live rent-free for years because of the snail's pace of foreclosure proceedings.

Meanwhile, their underwater neighbors poured money into mortgages, not savings or investments. They couldn't chase higher-paying work. Homeowners with negative equity are at least a third less mobile than other homeowners, according to a recent study in the Journal of Urban Economics.

But abandoning their homes was an option that appeared too dicey. "Walking away, it does wreck your credit history for a while and you can't get another mortgage for seven years," said Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. Defaulting also makes it harder to rent an apartment. "The other thing is, there is also some sense of obligation to repay your bills," he said.