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Ohio has 3 most vacant neighborhoods in U.S.

Wave of foreclosures has emptied homes in Rust Belt; tract in northwest Dayton is ninth most vacant in the nation.

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By , Staff and Wire Report Updated 2:03 AM Tuesday, May 5, 2009

CINCINNATI — Meet the forgotten part of the housing crisis.

While most of the attention has focused on the wave of foreclosures sweeping mostly middle-class, suburban Sunbelt neighborhoods from California to Florida, the nation’s emptiest neighborhoods have remained concentrated in the same places for nearly a generation: the mostly minority, poor, urban neighborhoods of the American Rust Belt.

An analysis by The Associated Press, based on data collected by the U.S. Postal Service and the Housing and Urban Development Department, shows the emptiest neighborhoods are clustered in places hit hard during the recession of the 1980s — Flint, Mich.; Columbus, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; Indianapolis.

The analysis also identified a census tract in northwest Dayton that was more than 40 percent vacant — making it the fourth emptiest neighborhood in Ohio and ninth in the nation. Of the 1,739 residential units in the neighborhood, 705 were vacant in the first quarter of 2009.

The neighborhood, between Salem Avenue and North Main Street, was the subject of a Dayton Daily News investigation in 2008 that found it was the hardest hit by foreclosures in Montgomery County. The census tract is bounded on the south by Delaware Avenue and on the north by West Fairview Avenue. The neighborhood surrounds Fountain Avenue, which had the most foreclosed homes sold at sheriff’s auction of any residential street in the county from 2005 through March 2008, the newspaper found.

The emptiest neighborhood in Ohio and the nation was in Columbus, near West Broad Street. That neighborhood had less than one-third of its housing units occupied.

Federal lawmakers have designated nearly $6 billion in the past year for local governments to buy and either rehabilitate or demolish foreclosed and abandoned homes.

The AP’s analysis shows the money will only make a modest dent in the problem. As of March 31, there were about 4 million homes empty for 90 days — a slight increase over last year’s figures and about 3 percent of all U.S. homes.

The federal money will be distributed based on a complicated formula that considers local rates for foreclosures, high-cost mortgages and vacancies. There won’t be enough money to completely fix places such as the neighborhood in west Columbus.

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