The percentage of underwater homeowners is currently at 15 percent. That’s about half of what it was in 2011, but still much higher than the rates of the late 1990s, when only 4 to 5 percent of homeowners were underwater nationally.

While California, Florida, and Nevada were the centers of the housing and foreclosure crisis during the recession, now problem counties are located in the South, upstate New York, and rural areas of Wisconsin, according to the report. These homes are often concentrated in areas where economic activity is stagnant and where home values have not rebounded (This interactive site shows negative equity rates in specific counties).

In the worst counties, the rate of underwater homeowners grew to 21 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 13 percent in 2011. These areas have experienced slow population growth and declines in median household incomes. The counties have seen an increasing number of renters, which is also causing rental affordability problems. They include Baldwin County, Georgia, Bell County, Texas, and Onslow County, North Carolina.

“Some of these counties were seeing signs of economic decline even before the financial collapse,” Michela Zonta, another of the study’s authors, said.

Negative Equity by County, First Quarter 2015

“The Uneven Housing Recovery,” Center for American Progress

Other counties are stagnant, their rates of negative equity are constant but high, ranging from 15 percent to 36 percent. They include Hartford County, Connecticut, Newport News, Virginia, and Decatur County, Indiana.

But even counties that have shown substantial improvement include zip codes where many homeowners are still struggling, the report found. In Contra Costa County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, nearly 40 percent of homes were underwater in 2011, and on average, just 10 percent are underwater now. And throughout the county, many zip codes have almost no underwater homes. But in a few zip codes in the far northwest and northeast parts of the county, more than 20 percent of homes remain underwater, the report found, showing how uneven the progress can be despite close proximity.

So what’s to be done? Some of the tools used to stabilize neighborhoods during the recession could work again, Zonta and Edelman suggest. The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Federal Housing Administration could fund further neighborhood stabilization and foreclosure-prevention efforts, for example. The government could extend the Home Affordable Modification Program and the Home Affordable Refinance Program past their current expiration dates of late 2016.

For homes whose owners can’t catch up on payments, banks should be required to maintain the vacant properties so that they don’t have a negative effect on the surrounding neighborhood by depleting property values or creating an unsafe or unhealthy environment. Banks should also be encouraged to consider short sales.

But policy doesn’t have to just focus on housing, the authors said. Since the areas with large numbers of underwater homeowners correlate so closely to areas with struggling economies, government policy could focus on creating more, and better, jobs in slow areas. Housing and economic policy might be created with the whole country in mind, but when specific locations are still lagging behind, it might be time to tweak policy to help long-suffering areas finally share in the recovery.

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