DECATUR - Decatur and Macon County are not immune to the foreclosure crisis sweeping the nation.

But local real estate professionals point to several factors that have kept total foreclosures down in comparison with other metropolitan areas of Illinois.

"Downstate, we are nominally more conservative than the Chicago area with not nearly as many subprime loans issued here," said Norm Willoughby, executive vice president of the Decatur Association of Realtors. "We didn't have the aggressive mortgage brokers in this area as there were in the Chicago metro area.

"Almost all of our bankers are into mortgage lending. And I'm not saying they don't bundle home loans for sale to other institutions. But that is all the local mortgage lenders do."

Willoughby said there are good mortgage lenders everywhere, but there also are those who were not too particular to whom they issued loans.

"Once the market got hot, prices went up," he said. "Locally, we saw 5 percent, 6 percent or 7 percent growth each year in home values, not the 40 percent or 50 percent found in many other areas."

The hot spots for mortgage defaults have been the East and West coasts and places such as Las Vegas, Nev., and Phoenix, Ariz., Willoughby said.

Good news in Macon County for 2007 was that gross residential real estate sales increased, though by less than 1 percent, from 2006, and the average sale price increased about $1,500 in 2007 from the prior year, according to Association of Realtors figures.

Glenn Easterling of Glenda Williamson Realty in Decatur agreed with Willoughby.

"Our (home) values have been relatively stable," Easterling said. "We didn't have the huge property value increases other areas experienced during the first half of this decade. When the values began to normalize in areas with inflated values, people went to sell their homes and found they could not get enough money out of their properties to pay off their loans."

That scenario has repeated itself thousands of times nationwide.

RealtyTrac, which bills itself as the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, issued a report Jan. 29 showing a total of 2,203,295 foreclosure filings - default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions - were reported on 1,285,873 properties nationwide during 2007. That was a 75 percent increase from 2006.

The figures showed that more than 1 percent of all U.S. households were in some stage of foreclosure last year, an increase from 0.58 percent in 2006.

RealtyTrac ranked Illinois ninth among the states in total foreclosures in January, but that ranking slipped to 12th in February as fewer new foreclosures were filed. Leading states for February foreclosure filings, in order, were California, Florida, Texas, Ohio and Michigan.

During a March 18 presentation at the Homeless Council Continuum of Care's community breakfast at Grace United Methodist Church, Dawn Dannenbring-Carlson, staff organizer for the Central Illinois Organizing Project, said the nation's foreclosure crisis will displace several times the people Hurricane Katrina did.

While the American Red Cross estimates that Katrina destroyed 275,000 homes when it ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, she said, the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, N.C., projects 2.2 million homes will be lost to foreclosure during this crisis.

"Katrina rightfully got a lot of attention," she said, "but the foreclosure crisis is huge, heartbreaking, and it is not going away."

The problem is more widespread than people realize, because most homes in foreclosure simply look like any other house posted for sale, she said, and it's driving down housing values everywhere.

"For every house within an eighth of a mile from your house that's in foreclosure, your property value goes down almost 1 full percent," Dannenbring-Carlson said. "If it's on your block, it's 1½ percent."

Dannenbring-Carlson offered more reasons people should care about the foreclosure crisis in the form of research showing that children of homeowners score 9 percent better in math and 7 percent better in reading and are 25 percent more likely to graduate from high school and 200 percent more likely to graduate from college.

"For people who own homes, their children have higher achievement throughout the course of their lives," she said.

Easterling said some homes that go into foreclosure were well-maintained until the buyers were forced to abandon them while others were never kept up from day one. He said it is sometimes difficult to tell which is which without looking inside.

Dannenbring-Carlson told the story of a woman named Carol who took out an equity loan for a new roof, then a zero-percent interest loan from the city of Bloomington to replace her sewer line. A financial adviser suggested she consolidate her loans and sent her to someone who ended up being a predatory lender.

"Suddenly over 50 percent of what she brought home every month was going to pay her debt," Dannenbring-Carlson said. "When you have somebody threatening to put out on the street a 69-year-old widow who's worked hard all her life the week before Thanksgiving, something's broken."

Ron Ingram can be reached at ringram@herald-review.com or 421-7973. Theresa Churchill can be reached at tchurchill@herald-review.com or 421-7978.