news story / By Japhet Weeks

House Poor

In March of last year, Eschker presented a “County Outlook” for 2008 to the Eureka Rotary Club. In that presentation, he compared housing prices in various California cities (Redding, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Los Angeles and San Diego) to Humboldt County between 2002 and 2008. As the major cities experienced housing price increases and decreases, so did Humboldt. Eschker says that’s compelling enough data to conclude that there’s no Redwood Curtain protecting us from the subprime crisis.

“The way that prices were rising in L.A. and Sacramento,” he said, “we have the same pattern here, and so the question is what’s going to happen with Humboldt County? Well everybody who’s making price predictions for those areas is predicting further price declines. … We shared the same upswing with them and it looks like we’ve entered the same downswing [as well].”

But Dan Johnson, president of Danco Builders, thinks the lull in the housing market isn’t a direct result of the national subprime mortgage crisis. Reached on his cell phone Monday, Johnson, whose company also has offices in Bakersfield, said that prices for Danco’s houses locally have dropped by only about five percent, whereas in Southern California they’ve plummeted nearly 100 percent — mostly because builders “flooded the [Southern California] market” with product. That didn’t happen on the North Coast.

The real problem, according to Johnson, is the lack of jobs in the county. The market for first-time homebuyers is nonexistent, he said, but houses in the $450,000-$600,000 range are selling.

Sitting in the sunlight-filled County Recorder’s Office last Thursday slogging through foreclosure data, Kristine Legg, a sprightly county documents examiner, said that she, too, had noticed a sharp increase in the number of notices of default over the past couple of months: 131 between January and April 2008, to be precise. That’s up from 77 over the same period last year.

Granted, not every notice of default results in a completed foreclosure, but the data that Eschker has gathered indicates that notices of default tend to peak slightly before trustee’s deeds (the final document in the foreclosure process) do. That means that in light of the 19-year high in notices of default the county is experiencing now, Eschker predicts that trustee’s deeds will soon surpass their late-‘90s peak.

Proof positive, he says, that no matter how geographically distant Humboldt County is from Wall Street, or how tall the great Sequoia sempervirens are that separate the region from sprawling over-built communities farther south, economically speaking, homeowners from G Street in Arcata to Main Street in Fortuna are certain to keep feeling the crunch.

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