Home Front: It's party time at Sacramento-area Sun Cities

It's anniversary time for two of the biggest housing developments the Sacramento region has ever seen – Sun City Lincoln Hills and Sun City Roseville.

Marking its 10th anniversary, Sun City Lincoln Hills will celebrate with a parade at 9 a.m. Saturday. It's part of a four-day party running Saturday through Tuesday for the retirement community's 11,000 residents.

The parade begins at the Orchard Creek Lodge and ends at Kilaga Springs Lodge on Sun City Boulevard, organizers say. Watch for kazoo players of a certain age, floats filled with belly, tap and ballroom dancers, and classic cars.

This year, Sun City Roseville also marks a 15th anniversary as the nation's first non-desert Sun City. It opened in 1994.

The two Del Webb golf course and age-restricted projects – with almost 10,000 homes – have brought thousands of older newcomers to Placer County and the capital region. Almost half the residents of Sun City Lincoln Hills came from the Bay Area, selling homes that appreciated during their working lives.

About 30 percent of Sun City Roseville residents moved in from the Bay Area, said Judy Bennett, marketing project manager for the Sun City Lincoln Hills Community Association. Many more came from elsewhere in California to be near their still-working children and grandchildren.

Bennett said the average age in Sun City Roseville is over 72. In Lincoln, "the average age is approaching 64."

Both projects sold quickly, catching upswings in the real estate market after the prolonged housing downturn of the 1990s. In a region reeling from foreclosures, both Sun City projects are also notable for a relative absence of them.

"There are two big reasons," said Bennett. "About 60 percent pay cash for their homes. The other part is they don't go in for the real creative loans. They are much more conservative in their loans."

'Active adults' rock on

Now that we're speaking of communities for people 55 and older, let's sing that old Grateful Dead "Truckin' lyric: "Lately it occurs to me/What a long strange trip it's been."

This is because boomers have lived long enough to see not just the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, but also now the region's first "Webbstock."

It's a '60s-style promotion – also Saturday – at Del Webb "active adult" communities in Roseville, Elk Grove and Manteca. Watch for hula hoops, rock music, VW Bugs and "guests in far-out outfits." Long strange trip, indeed.

Late mortgages

These reports of loan delinquencies just keep getting worse. As July ended in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties, 9.7 percent of mortgages were three months or more delinquent. That's the kind of lateness that's hard to recover from, experts say.

The July delinquency figure is up from 8.5 percent in February, according to First American CoreLogic, which released the statistics Thursday. In July 2008, 6.2 percent of area mortgages were delinquent.

It gets worse: Another 3.6 percent of mortgages in the four-county region were already in the foreclosure process – between a notice of default issued when borrowers fall behind on payments and repossession of the house.

In July 2008, that figure stood at 2.3 percent.

Finally, 0.8 percent of the region's mortgages in July were attached to a home that had been repossessed and listed on the market to sell.

That number was down sharply from 1.9 percent in July 2008. It shows that banks are keeping more of their repossessed homes off the market. That's possibly in hopes that dribbling them out will slow the rapid depreciation that happened last year when they released a flood of repos. It could also be that they expect prices to rise in coming months. The same trend is happening statewide and nationally, statistics show.

Source Sac Bee