LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. baseball star Jose Canseco said on
Thursday he had lost his California mansion to foreclosure -- one of
the first celebrities to publicly admit being a statistic in the U.S.
housing crisis.
Canseco, 43, one of the most flamboyant U.S. baseball players until
his retirement from the major leagues in 2001, told the celebrity TV
show "Inside Edition" that it did not make financial sense to keep his
7,300 square-foot (678.2 sq-metro) home in the Los Angeles suburb of
Encino.
"Inside Edition" said it had foreclosure do***ents showing Canseco
owed a bank more than $2.5 million on the house.
"I've been out of the game for about eight or nine years and obviously
this issue with the foreclosure on my home," he told "Inside Edition."
"I do have a judgment on my home and it to me is very strange because
it didn't make financial sense for me to keep paying a mortgage on a
home that was basically owned by someone else," he said.
Canseco said the foreclosure was not a difficult issue emotionally.
But he sympathized with the millions of other Americans who have
already lost, or face losing their homes, because of soaring interest
rates on sub-prime loans.
"I decided to just let it go, but in most cases and most families,
they have nowhere else to go," he said.
It was not clear from the "Inside Edition" re****t where Canseco was
now living.
U.S. home foreclosure filings jumped 23 percent in the first quarter
of 2008 from the prior quarter and more than doubled from a year
earlier, real estate data firm RealtyTrac re****ted this week.
Canseco was one of the first Major League Baseball players to admit
using steroids in his tell-all 2005 book "Juiced." His personal life
has also been controversial with two divorces and several run-ins with
the law for violence.
Canseco said a good ****tion of the money he earned in his heyday went
to pay for his divorces. "I had a couple of divorces that cost me $7
or $8 million," he said.
(Re****ting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Sandra
Maler)
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