Dollars & Sense blog: Skyrocketing Foreclosures

Banks have ended their voluntary halts on foreclosures, sending foreclosure rates skyrocketing 24% in the first three months of 2009.

Continued at Dollars & Sense blog: Skyrocketing Foreclosures
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Filed under: Economic crisis, Housing rights

Banks rob us again: People’s Bailout calls for protest

If it weren’t so deadly, it would read like a cheesy comedy sketch.  You know the one I’m talking about: man is confronted by incompetent crook who fumbles and drops his gun . . . man hands the gun back to the crook, who thanks him and then proceeds to hold him up.

That’s the routine that is unfolding in Connecticut and all over the country, as the same banks that receive millions or billions of dollars in the taxpayer-funded TARP bailout go about their business of foreclosing on peoples’ homes.

The first attempt to rob working people of their money didn’t entirely go off as planned.  Selling people mortgages for houses they couldn’t possibly afford at interest rates that were out of sight, these banks got so greedy that they bit off more than even they could manage to chew up.  The result was a real estate market overload, triggering a credit crisis triggering a system-wide economic crisis.

Based largely on the bankers’ desperate pleas that the world as we know it would come crashing down unless the government did something, the feds came up with TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program.  In other words, a bail out.  Several Connecticut banks received millions of dollars under TARP, while the major players such as Bank of America and Citigroup got tens of billions in taxpayer funds to keep them afloat after their first botched robbery.

Turns out that handing them back their gun wasn’t such a good idea.  Take a look at the lists of residential homes in the Hartford area that are in foreclosure or whose homeowners are in “preforeclosure” because they are behind on their mortgage payments.  While the bailed out banks aren’t the only ones holding a gun to homeowners’ heads, you will definitely see BoA, Citi, Webster, CB&T and other TARP’s banks on those lists.  Is this why we bailed them out?  So they could rob us again?

Foreclosures don’t just hurt the individual or family that is forced to surrender their home.  Neighborhoods with high foreclosure rates will also suffer declining property values as well as a declining quality of life as homes are left vacant, overgrown and uncared for.

And there is the additional wrinkle in many communities such as Hartford, that foreclosures on multi-family properties are leading to banks not only tossing out the homeowner, but going on to evict the tenants as well — even if they have paid their rent faithfully.  In the current economic crisis, foreclosures and evictions are especially traumatic for the victims and bad for everyone in the community.

That’s why the People’s Bailout Connecticut decided to focus its first action on Connecticut’s TARP’d banks.  On Friday, March 6 at 4pm, PBC is calling on everyone who is angry about the banks’ second round of robberies to gather at the Memorial Arch at Bushnell Park for a march and protest aimed directed against the banks.  Protesters will make their way up to CityPlace, headquarters of Webster Bank, to Statehouse Square, whose banking tenants include CB&T, and then across the street to the Bank of America for a 5pm rally.

At each stop, speakers will address the duplicity and criminality of the TARP’d banks, who are using our money to throw us out of our homes.  The corporations and the banks got bailed out – and even as you read this, plans are emerging for a second set of bank bailouts – but working class people are drowning.  Even the Obama stimulus package and the mortgage package are not going to save the homes of millions of Americans, and they will do nothing for renters facing evictions.

So what does the PBC propose?  Like the name says: a bailout for the people, not the bankers, starting with a two year moratorium on ALL residential mortgages and evictions.  If this were a hurricane, the government would take emergency action to keep people safe . . . the PBC says that in this economic emergency, Governor Rell should use her emergency powers to keep people in their homes by ordering the suspension of all foreclosure and eviction proceedings.

Those of us who are directly affected by foreclosures and evictions, and those of us who want to preserve our communities and the families in them, should turn out on Friday, March 6 to be a part of this protest.  It is the first small step in building a movement that can put the needs of working and poor people ahead of the banks and corporations.

Filed under: Community organizing, Economic crisis, Housing rights

Hartford tenant fights to stay in home after foreclosure

I should point out that I am not related to the reporter of this story from the Hartford Courant . . . That said, it’s a very good story about an important fight for tenants’ rights in the face of the current wave of foreclosures and evictions. The question is, however, whether we can win this fight by lawsuits alone.

Peter Goselin

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The Housing Crisis
Hartford Tenant Fights To Stay In Home After Foreclosure

By KENNETH R. GOSSELIN

The Hartford Courant

October 24, 2008

Four days after Evelyn Colon paid the September rent for her Hartford apartment, a U.S. marshal knocked on the door.

He handed her a notice that she had to be out in a month.

Fannie Mae, the huge mortgage financier, had foreclosed on her building and was evicting Colon and two other tenants.

Colon is now fighting her eviction in what her attorneys believe is the first court challenge in the country to use a provision deep within the government’s $700 billion bailout legislation to seek protection for renters facing eviction after foreclosure. She will be able to stay in her apartment while the case is litigated.

If successful, tens of thousands of tenants like Colon who have dutifully paid their rent may get a chance to stay in their apartments even if their landlords’ property has been foreclosed on by federal agencies that help fund mortgages.

The case, filed in Housing Court in Hartford, could bring more attention to the plight of renters in the foreclosure mess, many of whom are being kicked out of their homes because their landlords have defaulted on their mortgages. So far, most of the attention has been on trying to keep homeowners in their homes.

Filed under: Economic crisis, Housing rights