So does that mean there will be 50,000 or some homes being poorly maintained, growing weeds, cultivating indoor mold colonies, etc.?

Seems that could have a lot of collateral damage on neighborhoods, home values, quality of life, etc.

Yet more fallout from the 'wonderful' Bush years. Eight years of Republican Presidency along with 10 years of Republican control of Congress and they fools want to blame Obama for not getting their mess cleaned up in two years - traitorous.

This statement might be true: "It’s going to be a couple of years of this slow unwinding until the markets start picking up.."

But this statement is also has an ominous echo to it.

Baltimore should protect homeowner investments by demolishing the legions of abandoned and delapidated housing that blight our city. The end result will be fewer houses, more greenspace, and support for existing/increased property value.

John: your idea makes a lot of sense but unfortunately our elected officials have no vision for the city beyond maintaining the status quo.

So off of Burns' numbers, shadow=3 times visible.

Even converting to CoreLogic's methodology shadow=2 times visible.

RE: protecting homeowner investments by demolishing, I met some card-carrying socialists at the book fair this past weekend who thought the fundamental problem of modern economics was too much supply. I wonder what the families who are struggling to pay their rent, or the 20 somethings packed in 3-4 strangers to a house in Fed Hill because they can't afford more than a room would say to that?

@walter - Keep blaming Bush that makes sense. It didn't have anything to do with the Community Reinvestment act (Carter, Clinton) or the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act(Clinton) noooo not at all. Bush and Obama certainly are not helping but you need to look further back for the housing boom blame. Lowering the interest rates didn't help either.

@Josh... too much supply of live human beings such that they must compete for access to that 3-4 strangers to a house situation because they have too much competition to make a high enough wage to afford better.

We really don't want to try (yet again) to "grow" out way out the mess... At 310,000,000 we're maxed out already. We need to retrench our way into a higher standard of living for the 240,000,000 or so educated, healthy and productive people (that might still be too many) the infrastructure worth salvaging can support and can afford to import the things not made here on our terms.
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That doesn't mean Baltimore can't still house 600,000 of these people... but Baltimore has only about 300,000 of them now (if that).

Wholesale demolition of every derelict structure with focused and intensive demolition of the structures remaining between them.

Make way for income tax paying citizens to move into the additional Ashburton's and Lauraville's that will fill those spaces and make way for the (100,000?) currently hindering success to find some other place to live. The 200,000 or so others a half step above them? Anybody's guess.

Harsh? Yes; it is.

Are these numbers reflected in people's actual experiences? Are there a lot of recently un-occupied, unlisted houses out there in people's neighborhoods?

direwolfc, the estimates are largely (in John Burns' case, entirely) homes that haven't been foreclosed on yet. Some homeowners leave before they have to go, but plenty of those homes are probably occupied.

@Josh: Lack of housing is not Baltimore's problem. Baltimore's problem is that there is a lack of DECENT AFFORDABLE housing. I can name a myriad of neighborhoods within Baltimore City that the 3-4 strangers living in a house in Fed Hill could move to at a much more affordable rate. The problem is that the they would not want to live in these neighborhoods! Baltimore has to offer what an average middle class tax paying resident would want – safe and affordable housing. Otherwise you have two options (1). move to one of the surrounding counties or (2). remain packed like sardines with 3-4 strangers in a Federal Hill row house.

"Tens of thousands of Baltimore-area homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments. "

How many are waiting for ObamaMoney to pay their mortgages?

Walter Hopkins, wow! What nonsense you spout!

You would think with that amount of shadow inventory around the country the big banks would be much more likely to strike deals with homeowners behind on payments. Unless of course they assume that the government will just bail them out again.

I've been saying this about shadow inventory for probably a year now here on this blog. I'd go with the 3x figure, because there are still more teaser "interest only" mortgages that will be adjusting this fall through the winter. Fun fun fun.

And it's going to take quite some time to wind through the system... banks are intentionally slow to foreclose and take possession because it poses a liability and a maintenance expense for them. And when they actually sell a foreclosed house, they have to disclose the loss on their balance sheet. So if they had a 300k mortgage with the foreclosed buyer but the house resells for just 200k, they need to book a 100k loss.

The problem is, the longer that houses sit vacant through rainy Septembers and freezing winters and muggy hot summers, the more problems you see. Cracked floor tiles, peeling paint, flooded basements, frozen pipes. It costs a lot of money to heat/cool houses, shut off the power and water, etc.... there really is no benefit for a house to sit empty, but bc of accounting rules, banks have to bleed out the inventory slowly to keep the paper losses manageable.

IMO, Chappy hit the nail on the head about banks being slow with foreclosures. There are so many preforeclosure and foreclosed properties out there that if the banks reported them all, they would all be in the red. It's really that bad, unfortunately, and I suspect it will taker significantly more than a couple years for this situation to 'unwind' at this rate, especially with the global economy languishing as it has been.

Great insight Jamie.

In my professional opinion the 'shadow inventory' should be stretched out over a period of time longer than two years.

Banks are reluctant to foreclose due to the high cost of foreclosure proceedings as well as subsequent costs associated with carrying the property.

Short sales are becoming more and more frequent and the lenders are almost forcing the borrowers in distress to do a short sale rather than taking the property back either through foreclosure or deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

In Baltimore County alone, the active inventory of bank-owned properties at the end of this summer was about half of that in the begininng of 2011.