I was surprised to read in the NY Times this morning that the county with the highest rate of foreclosure risk in NY State was none other than my home county, Suffolk.

Two of the three regions I’ve lived in the past—Long Island and the SF Bay Area—are among the most expensive in the country. So expensive, in fact, that any thoughts I have of “going home” are pretty much squashed just by looking at the real estate prices.

When we were out in the Bay Area in September, we saw very few foreclosure signs. We picked up real estate guides everywhere we went, from San Jose to Fort Bragg, and although prices are down from their historic highs, they are still vertigo-inducing. A one-page ad for a realtor specializing in the mid-Peninsula listed only one foreclosure (in La Honda, out in the redwood boonies where Kesey once had some wild parties); the rest of the homes were sold at or above the asking price…most in less than two weeks.

So what makes affluent Suffolk (and neighboring Nassau, #4 on the risk list in NY State), so different? The author of the editorial opines that opposition to high-density housing is one of the factors. I can see how a lack of smaller units would raise the bottom bar of the real estate ladder. If there hadn’t been condos available, I would never have been able to afford to buy a home in San Mateo county.

Another issue the author cites is segregation. I attended an all-white Catholic school in the 1960’s, where I was taught about the evils of segregation in the South…yet I was living in what was then a segregated county, and remains so to this day. While my street here in North Carolina is decidedly unsegregated, the county of my birth is more segregated than any metropolitan area in the South (according to CensusScope.org, Nassau/Suffolk was the 11th most segregated metro in the country in 2000; the first Southern metro on the list is Birmingham, AL, at #15).

The villages in Suffolk with the highest rate of foreclosure risk also have high minority populations: Amityville, Central Islip, and Brentwood (the latter, at least in my youth, was primarily Puerto Rican). Poorer neighborhoods—regardless of ethnic makeup—are prime targets for predatory banking (think “check-cashing” establishments); it appears they were also prime targets for predatory lending.

Even advocates of small government admit that government has a protective role, although that is usually thought of in terms of military and police. But the government regulations that Republicans love to repudiate also have a protective role. The financial arrangements deemed “predatory” are just that: they are designed for a high return to the lender, and usurious terms for the borrower. It isn’t wealth, but education, that is the best defense against predation. High schools often don’t teach concepts as simple as compound interest, much less how to calculate a variable rate mortgage, points and PMI. The poorest victims of the foreclosure crisis are also the least likely to have run the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet before signing the papers.

Deregulating predatory financial practices, and then allowing the predators free rein to target neighborhoods with the poorest schools, highest drop-out rates, and the highest rates of non-English speakers gives a new definition to the term “high-crime neighborhood.” The real crime is that the anti-regulatory “pro-business” policies that began in the Reagan years have led entire communities to the brink of disaster.

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