A vacant home on 25th Street in Merced - May 2009.

My hometown of Merced was kind of ground central for the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which in turn helped to set off the freezing of the credit markets and the start of the financial crisis. Merced has never been a wealthy town, and truth be told, a significant portion of the town looks the foreclosed house in this picture. Between about 2002 to 2006, Merced kind of went off the rails. Home values lost all touch with reality, people from other places were coming in and purchasing houses in order to quickly "flip them".

Merced has long had structural unemployment, often around 14 percent. The ratio of jobs to home values didn't make any sense, and everyone kind of knew that a massive bubble was going on.

It popped in Merced long before the meltdown in the global economy and the bailing out of the banks. In 2009, I walk around Merced and kept seeing house after house like this, vacant and foreclosed. This house was located at 736 West 25th Street in Merced, not far from a place called Applegate park. I posted this picture here, originally.