Underwater

Three years after the official end of the longest recession since World War II, nearly one in five mortgaged homes in the Baltimore metro area was still underwater, according to r eal estate data firm  CoreLogic. In the second quarter of this year, 18.3 percent of Baltimore-area residences with a mortgage -   116,301  properties - were worth less than what their owners owed, the firm announced this month. Still, that's an improvement. In the first quarter of 2012, 19.7 percent of homes in and around Baltimore were upside-down, the number-crunching company said.

Zillow says nearly a third of mortgaged homes in the Baltimore region are worth less than the loan amount -- far more underwater homeowners than other estimates suggest. The most frequently quoted figures, from real estate data firm CoreLogic, put the underwater crowd in the region at just under 20 percent . The big spread between the two companies' estimates are national, not just local. Zillow, a real estate site, says it worked with credit bureau TransUnion to get the exact loan balance for mortgaged homes -- including home equity lines -- so it didn't have to start with the original loan balance and estimate the amount paid off. Both companies estimate home values, Zillow with its Zestimate . Nationally, Zillow says 31 percent of mortgaged homes were underwater during the first three months of the year, same as its estimate for the Baltimore metro area.

More homeowners are slipping below the waterline. About 125,000 homes in the Baltimore region were worth less than what their owners owed on the mortgages at the end of last year, up from nearly 120,000 last summer, according to estimates from real estate data firm CoreLogic. All told, close to 20 percent of borrowers are upside down on their mortgages, the company said. The underwater phenomenon grew nationally as well , engulfing an additional 400,000 homes and inching up to nearly 23 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage.

With a new survey finding the Chesapeake Bay's crab population at its lowest level in five years after a poor spawn last year, Maryland officials announced Friday they would move to tighten catch limits on the region's iconic crustacean. The annual winter survey of Maryland and Virginia waters tallied 300 million crabs, the Department of Natural Resources reported. That's down nearly two-thirds from the number seen last year, when Gov. Martin O'Malley held a press conference at a crab house in Annapolis to declare crabs had rebounded from near-collapse in 2008 and were more plentiful than they'd been in nearly two decades.

EVERY NOW AND THEN, you stumble across a story that is so wonderful you say to yourself: "If this story were made into a movie, Roger Ebert would deliberately expose himself to mutating radiation so he could grow additional thumbs and point them up." Today I want to tell you such a story. It was brought to my attention by alert reader C. Erik Enockson, and it has what Aristotle called the Four Essential Elements of Drama: (1) despair, (2) intrigue, (3) Canadians and (4) snorkeling. When you read this story, you're going to think I made it up. But I ask you: Have I ever lied to you?

ST. LEONARD -- Dug from the soil or lifted from a mucky river bottom, archaeological artifacts begin to lose their voice.Rot and corrosion race through wood and metal exposed to air. And relics stuffed into boxes can tell their story only as long as labels, paper records and the artifacts themselves remain intact and accessible.Yesterday, Maryland dedicated a $9.1 million Archaeological Conservation Laboratory in St. Leonard, designed to save the state's neglected archaeological treasures so that all Marylanders can hear their stories.

Air Force Maj. Justice Sakyi's change-of-station orders to Germany came with a built-in dilemma: what to do about his family's home in Maryland. He and his wife, Olivia, bought the single-family house in Bowie in early 2006, near the height of the housing bubble. Then came the bust. Selling for what they owe is impossible. They can't rent the place out for nearly enough to cover the mortgage. And they haven't been able to negotiate a lower payment. "We believe in miracles still happening and so we are waiting for ours, to get rid of the house," Olivia Sakyi wrote in an email from Spangdahlem, Germany.

If you owe $100,000 more on your mortgage than your home is worth, do you have any idea when you might reach the break-even point? HSH.com , a mortgage-information company, has a new calculator designed to help answer the question -- variations of which are bedeviling millions of borrowers across the country. (In the Baltimore area alone, 125,000 homes are "underwater," real estate data firm CoreLogic estimates.) HSH's "KnowEquity When" calculator , launched this week, spits out an at-the-waterline date after you enter in your mortgage terms (how much, when, what interest rate)

One in four Maryland borrowers owed more on his or her home than it was worth at the start of this year, according to CoreLogic's newest estimates -- a lot of people, but not quite as many as the company thinks were underwater last year. The real estate data firm put the tally at just over 335,000, down from 365,000 in the final three months of last year and the lowest figure since the summer of 2010. Maryland ranked 9th among states with the highest levels of negative equity.

THE CAMPAIGN to clean up and restore the Chesapeake Bay doesn't just affect factories and developers, watermen and sewage plants. It touches things we all do. That's what recreational boaters in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties learned, as the Environmental Protection Agency opposed dredging plans in their creeks. Dredging the deeper navigational channels in Magothy and Middle rivers would destroy 3.5 acres of newly grown, ecologically valuable underwater grasses. EPA asked the Army Corps of Engineers to deny the dredging permits sought by waterfront owners.