Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

That’s the way the Plain Dealer sees it, anyway. (Article.)
So… I wonder if they’ll stop rationing the toilet paper now.
(That’s not a joke.  Ask someone who works there.)

Click on the graphic for a Google map of local properties owned (as of yesterday) by Marc Tow and Michael Alexander’s companies, EZ Access Funding and Diamond Housing Group.

(Map created using County Auditor’s data and GPS Visualizer.)

In response to yesterday’s post about the California “predatory investor” whose company, EZ Access Funding, owns the vacant house on West 83rd that exploded and burned Monday, I got the following email last night:
Dear Mr. Callahan,
We have seen your blog online. Since we found out about the explosion on our property in Cleveland we have [...]

It turns out that the gas explosion that levelled 2022 West 83rd St. this afternoon, ripping through the surrounding neighborhood and leaving dozens homeless, is part of a whole other story.
Waaaay down at the bottom of the Plain Dealer’s online  article about the tragedy we find this:
James and Irene Garman sold the home in December [...]

It seems Cuyahoga County had about six hundred more mortgage foreclosures last year than I reported in this post two weeks ago.
Mike Schramm, NEO CANDO’s housing statistics guru, sent around an email alert on Friday about corrections to the CWRU site’s 2009 foreclosure filing statistics. Apparently their database had a significant undercount of new cases [...]

From data at  NEO CANDO (available only through December 22, so far):

Notice that these eight biggest filers accounted for 65% of the county’s 2009 foreclosures.
Meanwhile:

BofA says bonuses will rise, but no record payouts
Wells Fargo Pays $25 Million in Stock Bonuses
Bank Bonuses, Bigger Than Ever, in the Spotlight

Our friends at NEO CANDO don’t have figures for the last week of December yet, but it’s now possible to combine information from the Common Pleas Court docket with NEO CANDO’s totals through December 22 and conclude that…

Just under 10,800 new mortgage foreclosures were filed in Cuyahoga County in 2009… the lowest total in four [...]