It seems that Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, is in quite a predicament. The Minnesota legislature has spent the past few weeks building and revising a bill that attempts to combat foreclosure in the state, and the bill has finally come across Pawlenty’s desk. Minnesota’s citizens are hungry for legislation to combat rising foreclosures in the state, which are currently at record highs. Homeowners are losing their property in huge numbers, and as 2008 goes on, experts are only predicting the situation to get worse.

While the housing market and foreclosure crisis has been going on for years now, experts and economist are beginning to really fear that things could get much worse before they start to get any better. The sheer proportions of the foreclosure situation, which has seen the rate of foreclosure surge by 65% in the past year, are leading many to predict that the worst won’t be over until 2010.

At the heart of the housing crisis in the United States lie two problems: foreclosure homes and falling home values, and now many are blaming the housing crisis in the U.S. on the world’s current financial crisis.

Currently families all over the United States are finding it very difficult to keep up with mortgage payments, and with property values falling, they are actually losing money on their homes rather than gaining appreciation value. This slowdown in the housing market has had a huge effect on the U.S. economy as a whole, and despite big interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, many are worried that the U.S. is in an economic recession, and that predicts bad things not just for the U.S., but for the entire world’s lending and investment structure.

The city of Sacramento has been plagued by foreclosures for much of the past five years, and last year one of the city’s zip codes, 95832, saw more foreclosures than any other region of California. However, the rise in foreclosures coming on to the market has also led to a great increase in the interest of purchase of foreclosure homes in the city.

New statistics show that foreclosures in military towns are occurring at a four times faster rate than around the rest of the country. While traditionally many soldiers and military families end up taking out loans on homes through the Veteran Affairs department, many of these families end up opting for the low initial costs and flashy low prices associated with sub prime mortgages in the past few years. However, as the rest of the country has also learned, these mortgages quickly become some of the hardest to keep up with, and lead many families to foreclosure.

With the housing market in the throes of a full-blown crisis, buyers are enjoying themselves because of the large inventory of properties available for sale. Of course, most buyers are checking out the investment opportunities offered by foreclosure homes. for certain, they are a lot cheaper and possess greater return potential.

As the legislature struggles to find a solution to the rising numbers of foreclosures in California, one representative is now feeling the burden of the problem first hand. California state representative Laura Richardson, a member of the House of Representatives, saw her home slip into default last week after she fell behind on her home payments. The debt on her home has now passed a significant amount, and sources say a foreclosure trustee sale has been scheduled.

The California Research Bureau came back with the results of a report on the California foreclosures market this week, and officials are now saying that the problem is even more severe than they had previously thought. The report was commissioned by The Assembly Banking and Finance Committee to determine how the economy and citizens of California were being effected by the huge foreclosure surge.

Foreclosure tours are the newest trend in the marketing of the huge inventory of foreclosure homes up for sale nationwide, and while the tours were previously mainly seen in foreclosure ravaged areas like Florida, California and Nevada, their popularity is now spreading to other areas of the country as well. This trend shows just how far reaching the foreclosure problem is.

The Miami foreclosures market continues to boom well into 2008, as the most recent statistics show that the Miami area has the 14th highest rate of foreclosure out of all metropolitan areas nationwide. The current rate in the city tops out at roughly 1 in every 90 homes currently undergoing some stage of the foreclosure process, leading to a huge surplus of Miami cheap homes available through foreclosure auction.