Detroit will not only be the city affected by General Motors’ bankruptcy filing. In the next year and a half, 14 plants and 3 warehouse facilities around the country will be closed, putting over 20,000 auto workers out of work and causing more foreclosed new homes.

In Detroit, the scheduled closure of the Orion assembly plant with 3,405 employees and the Pontiac truck plant with 2,671 employees will put more than 6,000 families without a stable source of income.

The Michigan property market, which has been showing some signs of recovery, may again reverse its direction because of the plant closures.

Bill Martin, chief executive of the Michigan Association of Realtors, said there has been a significant increase in sales but home prices continue to go down. The plant closures could push house prices further down.

In Detroit, sales of foreclosed new homes and non-foreclosed homes had increased by 23 percent for the first quarter this year, compared to last year’s first quarter. For the houses sold in April, the average price was only $20,514.

Martin added that the additional 40,000 unemployed auto workers will surely increase the number of foreclosed new homes and worsen foreclosure-related problems.

For many years, Detroit has been clobbered by foreclosures. In April, 6,259 houses were hit with foreclosure filings, based on RealtyTrac data.

Even so, Bob Curran, a broker for Century 21 based in Dearborn, is hopeful. He said Dearborn, where Ford Motor is based, and other Michigan cities have gone through downturns before.

He said that the decline in home prices have been increasing sales of foreclosed new homes and non-foreclosures as first-time buyers took advantage of the tax credit and low mortgage rates. He also observed that Australians and Canadians have been buying properties and that Californian investors have been snapping up foreclosed new homes and non-foreclosures several units at a time.

Bank-repossessed homes are being sold in bulk below $10,000 each while foreclosed new homes located in well-maintained neighborhoods are being sold for approximately $45,000.

In other Midwest cities, such as Mansfield, Ohio, increasing home affordability is the only good news. According to the Wells Fargo Bank and the National Association of Homebuilders, the median price in Mansfield declined in the first quarter to $70,000 from the 2005 median price of $95,000 in 2005.

Unlike smaller cities, the city of Indianapolis, where 670 GM workers will become jobless, is expected to survive GM plant closures and the consequent foreclosed new homes because of other large employers based in the city, such as drug maker Eli Lily, insurer Conseco and major medical manufacturers.