You might suppose, now that the economy has been officially in rececssion for nearly 18 months, that we would start to see very high foreclosure rates in states heavily hit by unemployment. But if you supposed that, you would be wrong. The April 2009 foreclosure statistics from RealtyTrac, show that foreclosures are still heavily concentrated in the four “sand states,” California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. Together they account for 193,659 of the 342,038 foreclosure filings in the United States, 57% of the total. At the opposite extreme are Vermont and South Dakota, where there were 2 and 17 foreclosure filings in April (those are whole numbers, not percentages). No other state has more foreclosure filings than each of the four sand states; the next highest is Illinois with 13,647.
You can see the national imbalance most vividly by measuring the number of foreclosure filings per 10,000 houses. The table shows the states exceeding the national average of 27 and lists the total number of foreclosure filings in each plus the March 2009 state unemployment rate:
