Todd Swanstrom, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration at UMSL, wrote "Resilience in the Face of Foreclosures: Lessons from Local and Regional Practice."

Real estate data company RealtyTrac has reported that a new record for foreclosure filings could be set in 2011. In a new national report, University of Missouri–St. Louis political scientist Todd Swanstrom looks at how cities and counties are responding to this ongoing predicament.

Swanstrom, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration, wrote “Resilience in the Face of Foreclosures: Lessons from Local and Regional Practice” with James A Brooks, program director for housing and community development in the Center for Research and Innovation at the National League of Cities.

The research report was published last week by the National League of Cities. It includes extensive studies of the following six metropolitan regions: St. Louis; Atlanta; Chicago; Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; Cleveland; and Riverside-San Bernadino, Calif.

The report includes summaries of strategies used in these areas to help mitigate the foreclosure challenge and set the stage for initiatives designed to revitalize the neighborhoods that have been impacted by foreclosures.

“Despite the staggering volume of foreclosed and vacant properties, there are success stories to be reported about the ways in which cities, counties and their elected local leaders are responding to the continuing waves of home mortgage foreclosures,” Swanstrom and Brooks wrote in the report.

In St. Louis, the report highlighted several foreclosure responses, including:

*the Federal Reserve’s leadership role in helping pull together the Metro Foreclosure Intervention Task Force

*efforts by public television station KETC (Channel 9) to educate and counsel the public on foreclosures

*St. Louis nonprofit Beyond Housing’s work to keep Normandy (Mo.) School District residents in their homes

Swanstrom has written six books and published more than 25 scholarly articles. He has served as a neighborhood planner for the city of Cleveland and as a staff director of strategic planning for the city of Albany, N.Y. He has also been a member for the MacArthur Foundations Building Resilient Regions Network since 2004.

Visit http://pprc.umsl.edu/data/RIRR_ForeclosuresResilience2010.pdf to read “Resilience in the Face of Foreclosures.”