How can a bailout bill be beneficial to NEOhio?

Cleaning up the bailout mess will take hundreds of billions of dollars in a number of years.  Focusing only on repairing the balance sheets of irresponsible financial institutions means that the physical consequences of this mess will be left for the cities to sort out. Bill Callahan, our best source of clear eyed analysis on the foreclosure crisis, outlines an agenda for our political leadership to follow.

[W]e need to focus on what the banks must give in order to get the TARP [“troubled asset recovery program”] to take over their problems, and on what the TARPwill be able and required to do with the real-world assets (i.e. houses) at the heart of this transaction.

Jim Rokakis [the Cuyahoga County Treasurer] is fond of pointing out that nobody cared when financial blood was running in the streets of Cleveland, but now that blood is running in Wall Street it’s a national crisis. The deal that stops the bleeding on Wall Street and gives the banks a new start must do the same for the streets of Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati and Chicago.

You can read more of Bill's analysis here. You can download his memo at the base of this post. Here's his memo:

Dynamic mapping helps us understand the geographic dimensions of the fallout. You can start with the Wall Street Journal map here.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York also publishes a dynamic map that helps pinpoint the geographic impact of the subprime meltdown. You can view the map here.

The blog Economic Populist also has a helpful set of maps.

HotPads.com provides a more useful  set of "heat maps" that enable you to identify the impact of the foreclosure crisis on Northeast Ohio. You can start with a broad search and then narrow your search to specific counties and zip codes. The hardest hit counties in NEOhio (showing darker red in the map below):

• Cuyahoga
• Lorain
• Stark
• Summit
• Trumbull

You can zoom in to see the pattern of individual property foreclosures. Now you start to see why Bill's points are so critical for the future of cities in Northeast Ohio.

If you're interested in getting more perspective on how this mess has come to be, take some time and read Kevin Phillips' Bad Money.