The allegations have percolated for months. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Waters, against the advice of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the head of the House Financial Services Committee, had boosted the bank and called the Treasury Department on its behalf:

When Rep. Barney Frank was looking to aid a Boston-based lender last fall, the Massachusetts Democrat urged Maxine Waters, a colleague on the House Financial Services Committee, to “stay out of it,” he says. The reason: Ms. Waters, a longtime congresswoman from California, had close ties to the minority-owned institution, OneUnited Bank.

Ms. Waters and her husband have both held financial stakes in the bank. Until recently, her husband was a director. At the same time, Ms. Waters has publicly boosted OneUnited’s executives and criticized its government regulators during congressional hearings. Last fall, she helped secure the bank a meeting with Treasury officials.

When Waters called, her husband no longer sat on OneUnited’s board, but did hold its stock. Waters has vocally supported the minority-owned bank, which got into financial trouble due to its holding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock. It eventually received funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. OneUnited executives have given $12,500 to Waters’s election campaigns, the Wall Street Journal says.

Waters has reportedly elected to go through an ethics trial, like Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), rather than accepting the charges. The trial will take place around the time of the midterm elections.

The neighborhood group is still trying to get the case back in housing court, but it’s a difficult battle. Let’s see: A neighborhood nonprofit up against the financial resources of two global banks. Whose pockets do you think are deeper?

It’s no surprise those banks wanted the case moved to federal court. It will be much more costly for the neighborhood group to argue its case there. Housing court judges, on the hand, can and do handle these cases quickly and efficiently. They bring the hammer down on banks that leave foreclosed properties behind in cities for the taxpayer to clean up. They often don’t buy the argument that servicers are responsible for the upkeep of the properties.

I remember talking early last year with Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka, who has drawn national attention for holding banks responsible for dumping foreclosed properties. Pianka lives in a Cleveland neighborhood, he told me. There are foreclosed houses on his street. This crisis is part of his everyday life.

The move to federal court is more than just an arcane legal development. The neighborhood group wants the case heard in housing court because it validates what has become increasingly clear in the foreclosure crisis: Banks are property owners, with all the responsibilities that come with it. As they foreclose on houses and their inventories of bank-owned properties swell, banks try to dodge this reality by blaming servicers and paying lawyers to get them out of housing court. The same thing happened in Cincinnati recently, where the local legal aid agency filed suit in housing court, but the case was moved to a federal court instead.

Maybe this tactic will work for a while, but eventually, I think banks are going to have to be held accountable for what they’ve done. Entire swaths of neighborhoods in once-great cities are in ruins – that’s not an exaggeration – as banks fail to secure, maintain or demolish foreclosed properties. Neighbors who pay their mortgages feel the pain as their property values plummet. City coffers and services take a hit. It will take decades to recover from this.

And yet, the banks walk away. The bank argument continues to be that It’s someone else’s responsibility. But banks aren’t just lenders anymore – like it or not, they are property managers. If they didn’t want to be in that position, they shouldn’t have sold high-rate mortgages that they knew people couldn’t pay. So as property managers, they have the same obligation any other landlord would, and they should be subject to housing code violations, just like any other landlord would. It’s too bad policymakers who put together the bailout didn’t put some conditions on it to require banks to do their part.

Instead, they got a free ride. And homeowners in neighborhoods all around the country are paying for it.

In the housing crisis, poor people — of all the likely suspects — are playing the role of scapegoats. Conservatives support the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law, caused the subprime mortgage meltdown. They contend government regulations forced lenders to make bad loans to low-income borrowers.

Thoma quickly dismisses this. Instead, he raises an important question. If someone has good credit, and pays their rent month after month, year after year, shouldn’t there be some way to help them buy a house?

From Thoma:

We are about to start passing rules and regulations to try to prevent another financial crisis from happening, and I don’t want to see people excluded from home ownership unnecessarily. I know it’s unfashionable to stick up for the poor right now, to advocate for increased home ownership, and in particular to say that it was not a mistake to try to increase home ownership rates at lower income levels, but (1) poor households didn’t cause the financial crisis, though in many cases they were victims of it, and (2) it’s the right thing to do in any case.

He’s on the mark, here – it is the right thing to do.

And, as Thoma points out, there are right ways to do it. The correct lesson from the housing crisis isn’t to keep poor people from buying homes — it’s to help them afford to maintain home ownership once they do buy. Oftentimes, pricey home repairs, like a new roof, can send people who live close to the edge over that edge, and they default. Also, low-income borrowers are the least likely to have enough money for a substantial downpayment, which either excludes them from buying entirely, or puts them into a home for which they have little stake – another risk factor for default.

Thoma has some great proposals for this, which I haven’t heard talked about before:

If your household income is in the qualifying range, the government will grant you an equity stake in the house of, say, $5,000 (or pick an amount you like better). If you stay in the house for seven years or more, then the $5,000 is yours if you ever sell the house (perhaps as a tax credit)….

A big problem would be repairs – roofs, plumbing, that sort of thing. Big expenditures like that could cause problems and lead to default. Some sort of insurance against this could be made available and required as part of the house payment (along with co-pays to create better incentives but still keep the cost reasonable).

Thoma says his ideas aren’t refined, but they are a beginning.

Whatever solutions policymakers can come up with, the goal is the same – something ought to be done. In this atmosphere of rescuing banks and shoring up the credit markets, it could be easy to overlook supporting home ownership for low-income borrowers.

In the long run, doing so would be yet another mistake.