Here's a Forbes Magazine top 10 list Boise would gladly have skipped.
The national business magazine's Web site has ranked Boise seventh on its Top 10 list of Worst Cities For Homeowner Debt.
Forbes said 26 percent of Boise's households are carrying second mortgages or home equity loans. A few - 0.7 percent - carry both.
Earning a spot of this particular list broke a string of accolades for the city.
Last month, Boise ranked fifth on Forbes' annual list of the best communities for business and for starting a career, the fourth year it has finished in the top five. A week later Fortune Magazine named Boise the 19th best place to "Live & Launch." In 2005, the city was named second in the nation on Inc. Magazine's list of best cities to do business.
Those accolades provided ammunition to organizations like Boise Valley Economic Partnership when pitching the Treasure Valley as a good location for a business to relocate.
Being on the list of cities where residents are "up to our eyebrows in debt" won't hurt Boise's reputation as a business-friendly community, said BVEP Executive Director Paul Hiller. He called the latest list the equivalent of "having the greatest number of people who where brown shoes."
"Companies are interested in the cost of labor, rents per square foot, age of population and education levels," Hiller said. "I've never had anybody ask about homeowner debt."
The Forbes article said the less equity a homeowner has in a home where home values are falling, the more likely the homes could fall into foreclosure.
Don Holley, Boise State University professor of economics, said Boise is still in better shape than most other cities.
"The decline in homeowner values is not just here, it's national," Holley said.
For example, Sacramento's median home price was still in the $300,000 range despite a 18.5 percent decline in the last year, Holley said.
"That puts Boise in lower end (when it comes to falling median home prices)," he said. "It's not like in other cities that are going through their death throes."
Forbes said the debt was especially bad news for homeowners in Sacramento, Calif., San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Colorado Springs, Colo., markets, with some of the highest concentrations of homeowner debt and where prices are dropping.
That is "making it difficult for homeowners to refinance as lenders are reluctant to take on risk," the magazine said.
Denver, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Boise, Las Vegas and Madison, Wis., round out the rest of the top 10, Forbes said.
Holley said Boise's 26 percent rates of homes with home equity lines of credit or second mortgages isn't far from Sacramento's rate of 27 percent, nor from Forbes's best-ranked city, Cleveland, with 21 percent.
"There is not a lot of difference between the cities," he said.
Joe Estrella: 377-6465
