Vacant homes dot Plumas Lake

About a year ago, Plumas Lake resident Joe Cason noticed that his next-door neighbor on Branding Iron Way had moved out. And no one else was moving in.

That neighbor had been renting, he said, until she heard the house was going to be foreclosed. So she left. And the grass began growing, then turned into weeds. Bits of trash appeared in the yard. A fence behind the house began to collapse.

If one stands quietly in front, a beep-beep-beep from some kind of alarm can be heard inside, never ceasing.

Cason, 78, said the trees are what bother him. "The trees die, that's the sad part of it," said Cason, who moved to Plumas Lake nearly four years ago from the Bay Area. "Trees are what makes this place so attractive."

But in Yuba County, trees haven't been enough to stop a plague of empty houses.

According to U.S. Postal Service data collected for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, 8.9 percent of all homes in Yuba County had been abandoned for six months or longer through the first quarter of 2009.

The rate was 2.3 percent in Sutter and 3.5 percent in Colusa counties.

Yuba, which saw surges in home-building during the mid-2000s and then a related surge in foreclosures as the housing market deflated, led the entire state for homes where no one's home.

Many of those vacant homes are in places like Plumas Lake, where many home buyers on streets like Cason's used risky loans that backfired on them, causing a default and a foreclosure.

Cason said he and his wife at one point counted nine houses on their street that appeared to be vacant.

The vacant homes usually fall into one of three categories:

• Where the occupant moved out but the bank hasn't formally taken possession;

• Where the bank has foreclosed but not put it up for sale;

• Where the previous occupants moved out long ago, but a Realtor has had no success selling it to someone else.

Next to Cason, the vacant house at 1997 Branding Iron Way seems to have a recent history nearly as tangled as the overgrown shrubs lining the walkway to the door.

According to Yuba County records, its last human owner was Keith Wong, who got the deed to the home in December 2005. Two years later, the house had a notice of default, but Wong apparently got a modified agreement for the house between he and Washington Mutual Bank in late 2008.

This week, the house fell into default again, according to county records.

Real estate agents said vacant homes present them with problems if they mean a choice for buyers between a neighborhood with lots of them and one where they're harder to find and better maintained.

"If you go into a neighborhood and it looks like a wasteland, with overgrown lots and lots of high vegetation, that has a definite effect," said Lloyd Leighton of Lloyd Leighton Realtors in Yuba City.

But while Yuba County has seen a surge in vacant homes in the last few years, he said, the overall real estate picture is improving. Last month, 501 homes were for sale in Yuba and Sutter counties, a drop of more than 30 percent from a year earlier.

And that inventory could be cleared in 3.2 months, he said, more than half as long as it would've taken in May 2008. Still, the vacant homes will have to come onto the market and sell for them to disappear, he said.

"Many banks are still a little overwhelmed, they haven't ramped up their foreclosure departments, their short sale departments," Leighton said, adding he's seen reports that up to 70 percent of all bank-owned homes are still off the market.

"I would say you're going to see continued high numbers of foreclosures coming onto the market for the better part of the year," he said.

Though state law passed last year gives local governments more authority to go after homeowners, including banks, to maintain properties, it often takes neighbor complaints to make it happen.

Cason and other neighbors of the Branding Iron house said they're not mowing the home's lawns because they don't want to let the bank — or the county — off the hook for maintenance.

Russ Brown, a spokesman for Yuba County, said the code enforcement department has gotten relatively few complaints about abandoned homes in recent months.

In May, he said, the department had 26 active cases, five of them for vegetation. None were in Plumas Lake.

"The laws don't have a lot of teeth yet," he said. "And the complaints don't seem to be happening in newer neighborhoods."

But neighbors don't like such homes in any event.

In Plumas Lake, Walter Jackson, 53, was moving into a home on Branding Iron Way with four nearby that appeared to be abandoned.

"I don't know why they allow them to look like this," said Jackson, who was moving from what he called a high-crime neighborhood in south Sacramento. "I figure once we get settled in, I can start working on my own lawn to make it look nice."

And for 1997 Branding Iron, Cason's suggested solution may be the only one that will solve the blight of vacant homes.

"I'd like to see some good neighbors move in and take care of it," he said. "These are really nice houses."