The economy in southern New Hampshire is not by any means among the worst in the nation. Still, according to city records, there are 29 foreclosed homes on the books in Nashua — many of which are in deplorable condition.

Walls had been ripped open in this foreclosed home in Atlanta, Georgia.

“This house is not livable right now,” Nelson Ortega, the city’s chief building code inspector, told CNN as he stood in front of a boarded-up single-family home on a residential street in Nashua.

The foundation of the house was fractured, Ortega said, and there were cracks and fissures in many of the supporting beams. At the side entrance to the house were broken windows, garbage and peeling paint.

In 2006, Ortega said, the property sold for $200,000. It’s anyone’s guess, he said, what price the home might bring now, if it ever sold.

That this foreclosed home might not ever sell was not news to a researcher who lives nearby.

“About a third of all of the foreclosed properties nationwide have been so damaged, either by the previous owners or by criminal gangs coming in after the foreclosure, that they no longer qualify for standard mortgage financing,” Thomas Popik told CNN. “So there is going to be all kinds of government programs to help, but if they don’t qualify for standard mortgage financing, there’s no one to buy these properties.”

Popik says responses from thousands of real estate agents nationwide to the questionnaires he sends out quarterly indicate that badly damaged foreclosed homes — so-called “distressed” properties in real estate jargon — are a much bigger element of the national housing picture than officials in Washington have acknowledged.

CNN.com

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