Word: sapienza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...They can still afford to pay but they decide not to," says Paola Sapienza, a finance professor at Northwestern University and one of the paper's authors. "It's very easy to do this in the U.S." Even though there are serious consequences to reneging on a home loan - including wrecked credit, not being able to buy another house for years to come, the cost of moving and the social stigma associated with being a person who does not honor one's commitments - lenders tend not to pursue former homeowners for the money they are owed because of the prohibitive...
Data from the new paper also point to the likelihood of mass walk-aways being a highly localized event. Sapienza and her colleagues plotted data on late mortgage payments and home-price declines and found very little relationship between the two when house prices in a metropolitan area had dropped less than 20% from their peak. However, once prices had fallen more than 20%, a disproportionate number of people wound up behind on their mortgage payments, even when the unemployment rate (a measure of means to pay) was held constant...
...knew somebody who had were nearly twice as likely to say they themselves would. People who live in areas with high foreclosure rates were also more likely to say they'd be willing to walk away. "Once you see everyone else doing it, maybe the stigma goes down," says Sapienza. "It's also possible that there's a multiplication effect: if I know other people are walking away, the value of my house deteriorates." Which then would create the problem anew...
...narrowest, the Rockaway Peninsula - a tongue of land that sticks into the Atlantic Ocean at New York City's southeastern corner - is already vulnerable to storm surges and floods. Global warming, with its rising seas and harder rain, will only intensify those threats. That's what has Vincent Sapienza, the city's assistant commissioner for wastewater treatment, so worried. The Rockaway Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processes 25 million gal. (95,000 cu m) of sewage a day, sits next to the beach, and its pumps are below sea level. In a major flood, parts of the plant could be submerged...
...electrical equipment at the Rockaway plant well above sea level. The overhaul is just one part of New York's groundbreaking PlaNYC - a long-term blueprint to grow the U.S.'s biggest city green in the age of global warming. "This is about making the city more sustainable," says Sapienza. (See pictures of New York going green...