The Scale of the Foreclosure Crisis (UPDATED)

It's difficult to grasp the scale of the housing foreclosure debacle.  The New York Times makes an effort to give an example of the scale.

In New York State, it would take lenders 62 years at their current pace, the longest time frame in the nation, to repossess the 213,000 houses now in severe default or foreclosure, according to calculations by LPS Applied Analytics, a prominent real estate data firm.

Clearing the pipeline in New Jersey, which like New York handles foreclosures through the courts, would take 49 years. In Florida, Massachusetts and Illinois, it would take a decade.

UPDATE: Naked Capitalism turns a more critical eye to the foreclosure problem and finds that it is the banks, more than the public sector, that had a complete process meltdown.

[F]oreclosures that depended on fraudulent procedures are far less likely to be put forward in judicial foreclosure states (ones where the proceeding takes place through the court system), particularly ones where at least some of the judges are paying attention.

Thus what the article depicts as “backlog” (remember, LPS is including “severe defaults”, meaning deliquencies that have not yet resulted in foreclosure) is far more likely to be the result of foreclosures that either will not be initiated or have been abandoned. In other words, the samples all include a mix of foreclosures that are moving forward to resolution which should be parsed out and analyzed separately to see what the real time to foreclosure is, versus ones that the banks have dropped and/or are not initiating (and I don’t mean dropped by virtue of being contested, I mean left in limbo by the bank).