From Bloomberg:

Arson Surges Across U.S. for Foreclosed Homes Lost to Subprime

At 10:40 p.m. on April 27, a blaze at the beige Victorian house at 19 Nye St. lit up a neighborhood littered with boarded-up homes on the north side of New Bedford, Massachusetts. It left charred wood and melted vinyl siding on the three-story structure.

The house had been abandoned after the owner defaulted on a $240,000 home loan from GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, a Novato, California lender that shut down in August, 2007. The fire was one of four suspicious blazes in foreclosed properties that month in the southern Massachusetts city. All are under investigation.

The biggest surge of mortgage defaults in seven decades coincides with an increase in blazes in foreclosed properties led by states with the most repossessed homes, according to fire safety officials in Nevada, Massachusetts and Ohio.

“The more empty houses we have, the more fires we are going to see,” said James Wright, chief of the Nevada State Fire Marshal Division in Carson City, the state’s capital. “It’s particularly dangerous for firefighters, because they don’t know what condition these buildings are in or what they might find in them.”

National arson statistics for 2007, due in September or October, probably will show a significant increase as foreclosures climbed toward an all-time high in 2008’s first-quarter, said James Quiggle, a spokesman for the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud in Washington.
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“Home arsons follow foreclosure trends, with a lag,” Quiggle said, pointing to an increase after the last housing slump when the number of blazes reached 116,600 in 1992 from 111,900 in 1990. “We’re facing a potential spike in arson like we’ve never seen before.”