Mapping Foreclosure Risk in Queens County
Queens, New York, USA
By Asher Kaplan
foreclosure, housing, wealth inequality, mortgages, homeownership, predatory lending, subprime mortgages, queens, new york city
Ten years after the national crisis, small home foreclosures are still a major problem in Queens County, NYC. My approach with this project was to gauge the likelihood of foreclosures indirectly - to try to create a model for a missing piece of information by gathering adjacent data and using it to make inferences about the absent data.
Ten years after the national foreclosure crisis, its impact and the global financial meltdown it triggered have faded into the background as the American economy experiences a period of growth. Homeownership has stabilized in some areas hit hardest by the crisis, but many neighborhoods remain full of precarious homeowners living one large, unexpected expense away from mortgage default. An area still particularly at risk is the borough of Queens in New York City.
High cost of living, large numbers of affordable, 1-4 unit family homes, an aging population of owner-occupants, and myriad scammers and predatory lenders working in the area all contribute to Queens’ high rate of foreclosure filings relative to other boroughs.
Mapping foreclosures isn’t a simple task. Because useful point data would include personally identifiable information like addresses, mortgage statuses, etc., foreclosure data can be hard to get, and harder to anonymize.
Using insights from my experience as a paralegal with The Legal Aid Society’s Foreclosure Prevention Unit, I created a profile of a typical distressed homeowner and used housing, demographic, and economic data from the American Community Survey to create a risk model for Queens NTAs that matched this profile.
My approach with this project was to gauge the likelihood of foreclosures indirectly - to try to create a risk model for a missing piece of information by gathering adjacent data, using it to make inferences about the absent data. I’m excited about expanding this line of research as a planning student.
