On Sunday, a nonpartisan coalition from Northern Virginia
called VOICE[1]
met at First Baptist Church of Manassas, Virginia[2]
to “celebrate progress on recent campaigns to address the foreclosure crisis.”
Bank executives from Bank of America, General Electric, and JP Morgan Chase
were on hand alongside some political representatives.
Since the housing market collapse began, millions of
Americans have had their homes foreclosed upon (if beginning from 2007 to early
2012, there are reportedly roughly 4 million homes that have been foreclosed).[3]
Some of the foreclosures were done legally while the sheer volume of foreclosures
also started a fraudulent process of “robo-signing” foreclosure documents.
In September 2011, 30 VOICE activists gathered a 10%
sampling of foreclosure documents that included numerous errors[4]
such as mismatched signatures from bank officials and notaries.
Another activist for VOICE, Luis Lemus, noted that J.P.
Morgan chase told Luis’s family that they could not find their mortgage payment
paperwork and was told that they owed $27,000.[5]
Luis’s case is by no means an exception.[6]
Banks are, of course, in the business to make money, as the
saying goes. But what America’s top banks have done is fouled up the foreclosure
process so thoroughly that it’s anyone’s best guess how many homes were wrongly
foreclosed upon. Too big to fail? How about too big to care?
The actions of America’s biggest banks are criminal in
nature and should never have taken place. That it did take place demonstrates
that from the very highest echelons of these banks, decisions were made based
on how much money could be generated, not how best to sort out the foreclosure
mess.
Thanks to groups like VOICE, homeowners have a larger voice
to elucidate their concerns and legal troubles with. But it will also take a
concerted effort by America’s politicians to make sure that another foreclosure
crisis is avoided. I know, what a pipe dream.
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