The Dispatch wrote
City fights fallout from foreclosure
Monday, November 26, 2007
BY ROBERT VITALE
Columbus will spend about $5.5 million next year to deal with problems rippling out from the rise in home foreclosures.
It will board up windows and pull weeds around vacant houses, rehab some that can be sold again and tear down others that can’t. It will enforce a new law that police hope will stop thieves from stripping pipes and wires out of empty buildings.
The city will offer programs to teach first-time homebuyers how to avoid mortgage traps that end in foreclosure. It will help people on the brink make home improvements that are necessary but unaffordable.
And it will do all those things with less money than originally projected. Columbus was 23rd in foreclosure filings, whether the foreclosure went through or not, among the 100 biggest metropolitan areas during the third quarter of this year.
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