Yesterday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer began a series on the foreclosure crisis in Northeast Ohio. The numbers in Cleveland and its surrounding communities are staggering. I live in an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland and decided to check how many foreclosures are completed or in process in my neighborhood. In my zip code alone, there were 386 foreclosures in 2007three on my street. There were nearly a 1,000 in my zip code over the past two years.To give a sense of the scope of the crisis in the city of Cleveland, the lead article in the series compares the local devastation to that done by Katrina in New Orleans. Here is a brief excerpt:Regis Le Sommier, a Paris Match magazine reporter, covered the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina struck the nation's Gulf Coast in 2005. Then, this fall, he came to Cleveland, where he spent a morning touring abandoned and trash-filled houses in Slavic Village."This is really like New Orleans," he said.Nearly 24,000 people have lost their homes to Cleveland's Katrina. Nearly 10,000 of the city's houses have been abandoned . . .In St. Bernard Parish, a working-class suburb of New Orleans, the real Katrina destroyed about 13,700 houses . . .You can read the extraordinarily depressing story, and view and listen to the accompanying materials, here.