Mortgage foreclosures in Madison County

This letter from the Madison County Clerk caught my eye. I emphasized the part below that caught my eye (my apologies for the formatting):

CLERK of the MADISON CIRCUIT COURT


April 20, 2007

Ludy Watkins, Madison County Clerk

Re: Mortgage Foreclosures


To Whom It May Concern:


Do to our Local Rules and the large number of Mortgage Foreclosures we are going to change our way of filing Foreclosures. After May 1, 2007 you will no longer be able to specify the court in which you want to file in. We will be doing the Mortgage Foreclosures on a rotation system. Superior I, Superior III, and Circuit courts will be included in the rotation. All other filings will remain the same.

Take this as a sign of our local economy. What impresses me with this change in procedure is that we have had large numbers of foreclosures in this county for most of the past twenty years. I read this to mean that we are having even more foreclosures than we have had. Not good, folks, not good at all.

How this ties into the subprime lending (see my post here on that subject) I have no good answer but some guesses. Subprime mortages target those borrowers whose income and credit history make them a risky bet. That could describe quite a few residents of Madison County. So, there may be a connection.