Newly released Census data reveal that, as other evidence suggests, the recession has battered some areas harder than others. Census Bureau statistics show that 11.3 percent of residences in the U.S., about 13.2 million homes, stood vacant in 2010. There was a great deal of variation, however, among the 50 states.
Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post parses a J.P. Morgan filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and notes that the bank, the second largest in the United States, is concerned about the rising tide of strategic defaulters —…
Black homeowners are roughly 50 percent less likely than whites to receive help under the largest of the administration’s anti-foreclosure programs, according to a new survey of qualified families.
President Barack Obama is scheduled to unveil his agenda for revamping financial regulation later this week. As the economy struggles though a recession created by the banking industry, it’s crucial that Obama and his advisers craft a set of rules ensuring that the financial sector strengthens our economy instead of destroying it.
Not long after foreclosures started to take off in 2007 and the mortgage market’s collapse began to cripple the economy, one lesson seemed obvious: The predatory lending practices that led to the crisis had to be reined in.
But despite massive government bailouts of banks and lenders due to losses from toxic mortgages, that reform still hasn’t happened.
When do economists predict this good news will happen in the Centennial State? Look below the fold.
Just as a voluntary ban on foreclosures ended, a record jump in foreclosure activity in March is raising troubling questions about whether lenders and servicers are genuinely willing and able to do loan modifications on a large scale. And it poses an even more worrisome possibility: That many borrowers can’t be helped at all.
A ban on foreclosure sales and evictions from houses owned by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which began as a high-profile effort just before the holidays to keep people in their homes as the government tried to come up with homeowner rescue plans, is over.
Spokesmen for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac confirmed the ban ended March 31, in a response to an inquiry from our sister site, The Washington Independent. But its expiration didn’t seem to merit the same level of fanfare, with some housing advocates caught by surprise, scrambling for information today and Wednesday on listservs and in phone calls.
Abandoned and vacant foreclosed homes rapidly piling up in neighborhoods like these around the country are serving as symbols of the secondary damage caused by the foreclosure crisis — a catastrophe felt on the ground but still unseen by Washington. While Treasury Department officials and lawmakers look the other way, communities with shrinking resources are mostly on their own to deal with the blight and drag on property values caused by staggeringly high numbers of empty homes left behind.
Controversial last-minute changes to House legislation empowering bankruptcy judges to alter primary mortgages will do little to prevent struggling homeowners from trying to save their homes through bankruptcy, according to a number of housing advocates who are following the debate. Rather, pressures to limit the scope of a similar Senate bill, expected to be considered next week, pose a greater threat to the effectiveness of the bankruptcy provision, the advocates say.
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