According to a recent 60 Minutes episode an increasing amount of homeowners are ‘walking away’ from their homes and are headed down foreclosure alley- willingly. Apart from the more traditional foreclosure woes spurred by job loss, or illness these homeowners would rather foreclose due to underwater mortgages despite their ability to make payments.

In a separate Reuters article, underwater mortgages have increased from 21.4 percent in Q4 2009 to 23.3 percent in Q1 2010. In areas hard hit by foreclosure underwater homes account for more than 50% of all loans.

Interviewer Morley Safer of 60 Minutes states that rising negative equity in homes is a growing “epidemic.” Which begs the question: What good comes out of one epidemic compounded with the resulting epidemic of foreclosure? It becomes an even bigger crisis that could have been minimized by perhaps not considering the former an epidemic in the first place. But rather identified decreasing home values as just a low point in an ongoing real estate cycle.

Unfortunately it seems many prospective home-buyers were blinded by the boom, a real estate revelry if you will, and can’t take handle the hangover of the bust. They and forgot that real estate is in fact cyclic by nature. They also failed to note that at the very least real estate should always be viewed as a long-term investment.

Everybody is affected by foreclosure, owners and renters. If 50 percent of homeowners in a neighborhood decided to walk away, what becomes of that neighborhood? Vacant homes become magnets for criminal activity and depreciated values. If it doesn’t make it right for half a neighborhood, then it shouldn’t make it right for just one Underwater Joe to walk away.

Strategic defaulter Chris Deaner says he tried to renegotiate the payments on his $250,000 mortgage with no avail, yet the article does not cite what changed from being able to make the payments when they first approved the mortgage.

“They said they would take my home. I pretty much said: Go for it. It’s almost the ‘in thing’ to do now,” says Deaner.

For me, it doesn’t matter how you dress it up. A foreclosure remains a foreclosure even surrounded by water and a failure remains a failure whether it is fashionably strategic or not.