About 2,400 children attending Baltimore public schools lived in homes in foreclosure during the 2008-2009 academic year, up more than 20 percent from five years earlier, according to a new analysis by the Baltimore Neighborhoods Indicator Alliance.

It's not necessarily about their parents' failure to pay. Half the students whose homes were in foreclosure proceedings lived in rentals, a marked change from the pre-crisis years. In 2003, 2004 and 2005, less than 30 percent of foreclosure starts involved rented homes, according to the analysis, done by Matthew Kachura with the University of Baltimore-based alliance. (The research was conducted for the Open Society Institute.)

Above: a map showing the areas where foreclosures and public-school students intersected. Almost every school had at least one affected student in the 2008-09 year, but certain parts of the city have taken the brunt of the wallop.

Continue reading "Foreclosure's effect on Baltimore schoolchildren" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Schools, The foreclosure mess
        

Schools are usually a factor when parents go house-hunting. Sometimes that's No. 1, as in, "I'm not buying a place if it's not in XYZ school district."

Vermont-based Maponics wants to make it easier to see if the homes that interest you are inside the attendance boundaries of the public schools you like.

The company announced today that it has school-boundary data for the largest U.S. metro areas, including Baltimore, and expects to have every part of the country covered in a year. It's up to their customers to decide how to integrate the data, but you could start seeing it on real estate search sites in about a month. (Maponics' clients include Google, Trulia and Zillow.)

Here's an example of what it looks like: 

Continue reading "Searching for a home with schools in mind" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Schools