REOs

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 [...]

It’s a big day for banks: The Obama administration is expected to unveil new “too big to fail” proposals for dealing with troubled financial giants, Reuters reports. The proposals would “give the government the power to dismantle large financial companies that get into crises.”
The new draft bill is expected to take a tougher stance toward [...]

Well, at least one banking executive is personally feeling the pain of the foreclosure crisis: Wells Fargo has fired a top employee who moved into a foreclosed Malibu beach house and threw lavish parties all summer there, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for commercial foreclosed properties, broke company rules [...]

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki  weighs in on something TWI wrote about recently: The need for a new — and bolder — foreclosure strategy. Foreclosures continue to outpace loan modifications, even as the Obama administration presses the lending industry to do more. And in some communities, it’s not just the [...]

If you are a renter or someone who took out a simple 30-year fixed mortgage, it’s not surprising that you might  feel like the mortgage crisis is, well, not exactly your problem. You’re not the one who got into any sort of messy mortgage. What does a subprime loan have to do with you?
But via [...]

Our sister site, The Michigan Messenger, points out that the shrinking cities movement – an urban development approach that has drawn national attention to Flint, Mich. — is becoming an issue in the local mayoral race.
The movement calls for communities to cordon off mostly vacant areas, cut them off from city services and let the [...]

For a while now at TWI, we’ve been keeping and eye on developments in the shrinking cities movement. It’s a new idea for urban development, aimed at saving cities by making them smaller: Cordoning off the sections that are abandoned and marred by blight, urging the few people left to move, and letting the land [...]

CNN picks up on a mostly overlooked component of the mortgage crisis that TWI has been following: Growing numbers of trashed and abandoned bank-owned foreclosed homes. Some of the houses left behind by banks are so damaged they’re never going to sell, CNN reports, citing mortgage analyst Thomas Popik:
“About a third of all of the [...]

As we’ve noted previously, neglected and abandoned bank-owned foreclosed homes have caused problems with neighborhood blight and falling property values, in some areas. The Washington Post today reports on another difficulty with these Real Estate Owned (REO) properties. Sometimes banks are so overwhelmed by the number of REOs in their inventories that they can’t even [...]

This should have happened a long time ago: Banks that received government bailout money and  continue to charge consumers excessive fees on credit cards and other services are getting a second look, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The committee overseeing federal banking-bailout programs is investigating the lending practices of institutions that received public funds, following a [...]