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Although the massive amount of slated demolitions have created a lot of much-needed jobs, Frangos stresses that the work being done by his group is “not a wonderful job program that will last forever.” These projects were formerly just a “couple of hundred a year and now could be more than a thousand,” he said, “so there has been some increase in employment.” But he considers demolition regressive spending, as opposed to building something that would continue to produce work.

Talking about costs: the foreclosure crisis is creating tremendous costs for American families. According to numbers drawn up by The Center for Responsible Lending, foreclosures that took place in 2009 caused almost seventy million neighboring homes to lose an average of seventy-two hundred dollars apiece in equity, for a total loss of over five hundred billion in lost value. The CRL has also projected that, between 2009 and 2012, almost ninety-two million additional American homeowners will lose a mean twenty thousand three hundred dollars in home value thanks to nearby foreclosures, for a total of just under two trillion dollars in negative equity.

The CRL hastened to clarify that its projections represent only property value declines caused by nearby foreclosures, not price drops associated with short sales or the slowdown in local housing markets. The projections are based on data from Credit Suisse, Moody’s Economy.com and the Mortgage Bankers Association. The CRL was initially founded in 2002 by the Self-Help Credit Union, a nonprofit community-development lender, and is supported by several charitable foundations. Its goal is to protect “homeownership and family wealth by working to eliminate abusive financial practices.” It has previously taken a position of advocacy for consumers in legislation regulating both the payday loan industry and credit cards.

Although the concept of demolishing foreclosures has many ardent supporters, not everyone is a fan of simply flattening foreclosures. Julie Dworkin, the director of policy at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, dismisses demolition as “not ideal.” Her preference is that homes be rehabbed and made available to families who need a place to live, she said. Along those lines, she says that banks could do two things to make these goals easier to accomplish: making it easier to buy foreclosed homes and donating properties that are still in good shape. Nor is Dworkin alone in this view. Brian Davis, the director of community organizing with the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, which is located in Cleveland, said homes should be donated when they first come on the market when they still have some semblance of value. “After six to eight months, they have been stripped and aren’t worth saving,” he said.

Davis states that he knows neighborhoods are largely in favor of leveling blighted homes. He opines, however, that neighbors might discover that it’s “not… a bad thing” if a family moves into these homes, forming a deterrent for criminals. Davis dreams of a program where homes could be preserved and given to homeless people in exchange for their sweat equity: doing the hard work it would take to make the homes presentable and attractive again. His organization’s plan would be to have teams of four with various skills work on the homes, with a team member moving in when it was finished. The team would continue to work until all four members had homes. Davis says that homeless people in his community are stumped as to why homes are being destroyed when the rate of homelessness keeps going up. Even so, he grudgingly admits, there are still some homes that simply are not worth saving.

Blogger Dean Simmer says that this is also the case in his hometown of Detroit. “There are homes so blighted — burned out, second floor falling in — that no one should live in a home like that,” said Simmer, who teaches at Detroit Cristo Rey High School and runs the school’s information technology department. Simmer, unlike Davis, clearly sees several obstacles to turning foreclosed homes over to the homeless. Banks don’t want to get involved in the issues of “crime, squatters, injury, [and] liability,” he points out. Simmer believes that the best solution would be for the banks would be to have the original property owners keep paying the mortgages and stay in the homes.