We're all concerned about the housing market. Of course, one of the big stories in this market has been the tremendous increase in foreclosures. Here's a question for you. Lets say, I own my home and am having no trouble making the mortgage payments. Can a foreclosure that occurs down the street affect me? Listen

Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"It can, and actually this is the basis of a study from the very prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research. And the impact can be that a foreclosure down the street can impact your home and you by decreasing what your home is worth. In fact, this study calculated that for every nearby foreclosure - and by nearby, we mean something within a couple of miles - every foreclosure of a home can lower your home value by up to 1 percent. And I think there are two reasons for that. One, foreclosures obviously increase the supply of homes for sale. So you have more supply, the same number of people wanting to buy homes, that's going to decrease what you can get if you try to sell your home. Also, foreclosed homes often sell for less, and therefore, they're going to affect what you're going to get for your home, because it's actually costly for a bank to hold on to a foreclosed home. They've got expenses related to security, perhaps cleaning up the house because there's not an owner there taking care of it. And so a bank will accept less than if an owner was selling that home. So the fact that these foreclosures can have a broader impact not just on that home but on homes around them I think is a rationale for why we have the public - that is, the government - come in and try to stem the level of foreclosures."