This Is the State Where People Cannot Pay Mortgages

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 14, 9:30AM EDT

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This Is the State Where People Cannot Pay Mortgages — © Spencer Platt / Getty Images News via Getty Images

The housing boom that began last year and has accelerated this year continues to be extraordinarily strong, based on data as recent as July. Several things have fueled the surge in prices. One is low mortgage rates that have made homes more affordable. Upper-class and middle-class buyers have incomes that largely were not hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic economic downturn. In fact, a run-up in the stock market and in home equity has made many of these people more financially secure. Finally, people who can now work from home have moved from the country’s most expensive markets, like New York City and San Jose, to places where median home prices are lower.

Not all homeowners have been so fortunate. The pandemic did rob many people of their jobs. Even though national unemployment had dropped to just above 5%, millions of Americans are out of work. That means a portion of the population struggles to pay rent and mortgages. The Household Pulse Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau, shows that the housing problem is geographically uneven. So does research from private real estate companies.

To identify the states where people cannot pay their mortgages, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed state-level delinquency and foreclosure rates from CoreLogic, an online housing data solutions company. The primary measure was the percentage of mortgages in serious delinquency. Serious delinquency is defined as mortgage payments 90 days past due. Foreclosure is defined as property officially seized by the creditor due to the inability to make payments. Median home value figures were one-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey.

Though the states considered span the country, relatively few are in the west. Serious delinquency rates range from 3.2% to 5.3% in the states with the worst numbers. Nationwide, the serious delinquency rate is 3.2%, according to CoreLogic. The report adds, “While still high, this is the lowest serious delinquency rate since an initial jump during the pandemic in June 2020.”
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The state where people cannot pay their mortgages is New York. Here are the details:

Serious delinquency rate May 2021: 5.30%
Serious delinquency rate May 2020: 2.90% (the highest)
Foreclosure rate May 2021: 1.10% (the highest)
Median home value: $338,700 (eighth highest)

Click here to see all the states where people cannot afford their mortgages.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.