foreclosures

As the foreclosure crisis worsens, renters increasingly have become caught as innocent bystanders, evicted often without notice when their landlord faces foreclosure.

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

When is this ever going to end? Conservative lawmakers are seizing on ACORN’s troubles to once again go after the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law that somehow became a scapegoat for the housing crisis last year, the AP reports.
The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was intended to end redlining, a practice in which banks in [...]

A new study out today from the University of North Carolina Center for Community Capital provides more evidence that deregulatory zealots have a lot to answer for when it comes to the mortgage crisis: State anti-predatory laws actually worked, slowing down foreclosures.
But, alas, the state protections were overruled by the Office of the Comptroller of [...]

This shouldn’t go by unnoticed: The former head of Enron’s failed Internet division was just sentenced to 16 months in prison, The Washington Post reports. Joseph Hirko, the former broadband unit CEO also agreed to pay $8.7 million in restitution. Prosecutors contend Hirko falsely promoted Enron’s broadband division to analysts to help pump up the [...]

The watering down of the proposal for a new consumer financial protection agency continues, with the latest victim the end of vanilla option. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee this week that the option was being dropped. Via Felix Salmon, Mike Konczal at Rortybomb explains why this [...]

Now that commentator and PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley has severed his ties to Wells Fargo & Co., what about the bank itself? As Smiley noted in his decision to cut business ties with Wells, the bank is facing several lawsuits charging that it engaged in illegal discriminatory lending practices by allegedly selling high-cost [...]

Ever wonder why loan modifications haven’t become the silver bullet that would solve the foreclosure crisis? Via Patrick.net, USA Today explains in simple terms a phenomenon TWI also has noted, when it comes to loan mods: Borrowers who can’t afford their mortgages and go looking for relief wind up with higher — not lower — [...]

Journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the recession’s racial divide, making the point that the hard times are hitting the black community with particular fervor. In a New York Times piece this weekend, Ehrenreich correctly pointed out that even high-income blacks were more likely than whites to wind up with higher cost subprime [...]

This should come as no surprise: Even the mere mention of the possibility of bringing back cramdown legislation prompted the Mortgage Bankers Association to spring into action. Here’s the group’s rapid response to comments this week from several powerful Democrats, who who threatened to renew efforts to allow bankruptcy judges to change, or cramdown, mortgage [...]