The statistics on this vary. Given that the “fix” to the September 2008 crisis was merely kicking the can down the road, with no meaningful reform having taken place, and banks in even worse shape than before by “recovering” by going back to issuing the same derivative crap they were before, the “carry trade” (borrowing 60:1 leveraged money at .5% and lending it at 3%, if interest rates go up, the banks fail), S&P back to overrating the companies that pay them more money, etc., it’s only a matter of time before another housing crash.  Don’t believe all the happy talk.

Since the Financial crisis began in September 2008, about 4.4 million foreclosures have been completed according to the May 2013 CoreLogic National Foreclosure report. Some other stats from this report:

• About 1 million homes are in some stage of foreclosure.
  Another 2.3 million mortgages (5.6%) are seriously delinquent.
• States with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of mortgaged homes: Florida 8.8%  New Jersey 6% New York 4.8% Maine 4.1% Connecticut 4.1%

This May 2013 article makes the case that the current housing collapse is worse than what happened in the Great Depression. How Many People Have Lost Their Homes? US Home Foreclosures are Comparable to the Great Depression. NBC News reported that “5 million homes have been lost to foreclosure; estimates of future foreclosures range widely, and that foreclosures will strike another three million homes in the next three or four years.

Laura Gottesdiener. August 2013. The Great Eviction: The Landscape of Wall Street’s Creative Destruction. Tomdispatch.com

The Equivalent of the Population of Michigan Foreclosed

Since 2007, the foreclosure crisis has displaced at least 10 million people from more than four million homes across the country. Families have been evicted from colonials and bungalows, A-frames and two-family brownstones, trailers and ranches, apartment buildings and the prefabricated cookie-cutters that sprang up after World War II. The displaced are young and old, rich and poor, and of every race, ethnicity, and religion.  They add up to approximately the entire population of Michigan.

However, African American neighborhoods were targeted more aggressively than others for the sort of predatory loans that led to mass evictions after the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. At the height of the rapacious lending boom, nearly 50% of all loans given to African American families were deemed “subprime.”  The New York Times described these contracts as “a financial time-bomb.”