Tag: Foreclosure

President Barack Obama rolled out his plan to overhaul financial regulation last week. While much of the Obama plan relies on the same regulators and structures that led to the current meltdown, there is one key exception. The establishment of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency would give ordinary citizens a seat at the financial policy table for the first time and prevent the abuses in credit card and mortgage lending that have wreaked havoc on households all over the country.

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.

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.

With its stimulus spending, the Obama administration is looking to do two main things: put people to work immediately and create jobs for the future. The best stimulus projects do both. A proposal being floated in Colorado Springs by a nonprofit counseling group called Pike's Peak Behavioral Health puts its increasing population of military veteran clients and patients to work now with plans for work in the future, and has the added benefit of making something useful of foreclosed apartment projects around the state.

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.

For more on what went wrong with the economy and why it will be so difficult to fix, there's good material of every length on the web these days -- and most of it lands on one answer.

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.

Community organizers are recruiting volunteers to pressure lenders and law enforcement officials not to foreclose on homes in Colorado — and, if the pressure doesn’t work, volunteers plan to lock arms and resist sheriff’s deputies when they arrive to evict homeowners. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) plans to bring its Home Defenders campaign — unveiled in a handful of cities across the country last month — to the Denver area this Saturday with a rally at the Aurora home of Leonard McWilliams, a disabled Air Force veteran and single parent of three teenagers who has fallen five months behind on his mortgage.

Banks that received government bailout money are taking heat for spending billions of dollars on bonuses, executive pay and lavish outings. But there’s another outrage that Washington seems to be missing: the growing number of bank-owned properties in foreclosure scarring neighborhoods across the country.

Nearly 202,000 Colorado homeowners are expected to go into foreclosure by 2013, according to a report by the Center for Responsible Lending, with 60,640 foreclosures taking place just this year. The hardest hit district? Doug Lamborn's CD 5 — the home of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway and conservative epicenter of personal responsibility.