Obama’s efforts to aid homeowners, boost housing market fall far short of goals By Zachary A. Goldfarb October 23, 2011 It was a critical plan to jump-start the economy. President Obama pledged at the beginning of his term to boost the nation’s crippled housing market and help as many as 9 million homeowners avoid losing their homes to foreclosure. Nearly three years later, it hasn’t worked out. Obama has spent just $2.4 billion of the $50 billion he promised. The initiatives he announced have helped 1.7 million people. Housing prices remain near a crisis low. Millions of people are deeply indebted, owing more than their properties are worth, and many have lost their homes to foreclosure or are likely to do so. Economists increasingly say that, as a result, Americans are too scared to spend money, depriving the economy of its traditional engine of growth. The Obama effort fell short in part because the president and his senior advisers, after a series of internal debates, decided against more dramatic actions to help homeowners, worried that they would pose risks for taxpayers and the economy, according to numerous current and former officials. They consistently unveiled programs that underperformed, did little to reduce mortgage debts owed by ordinary Americans and rejected a get-tough approach with banks. Doing more to address the housing crisis may be crucial not only for an economy flirting with another recession but also for a president running for reelection. After watching their homes’ values collapse in recent years, a quarter of all homeowners are “underwater,” owing more than their homes are worth. The president’s housing policy has caused a rift with political allies, such as black and Hispanic groups, whose members have been disproportionately hurt by the crisis. On Monday, Obama is set to travel to the foreclosure capital of the nation, Nevada, where most borrowers are underwater. While there, he will meet with homeowners and push for passage of his jobs legislation, which includes money to rehabilitate hard-hit communities, and mention a program to be unveiled as soon as Monday that will reduce monthly payments for some underwater borrowers. But Peter Orszag, a former senior White House economic adviser, said the administration has underestimated how much the nation’s massive mortgage debts would weigh the economy down after the financial crisis. “A major policy error has been to put too little weight on the long, hard slog following a financial slump,” he said. “That leads you to being much less bold with housing.” Not that there were easy answers. The administration faced the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. Spending large amounts of taxpayer money to bail out some homeowners — but not necessarily their neighbors — carried huge political risks and faced opposition in Congress. In this context, some senior officials say they could not have been much more aggressive. “We tried to operate at the frontier of what was possible and have continuously expanded and refined our programs in an attempt to reach as many homeowners as possible,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. “We do not believe that there were feasible alternatives available to us within our authority that were better.” Obama has rarely spoken publicly about his frustrations with the housing crisis, but in a private meeting with his advisers at the White House in December, his concerns boiled over. The president opened the meeting by saying how he had received letters from homeowners warning about problems with his housing programs. He pointed out that he had been assured by his advisers that banks would be able to step up, according to two people who attended. But at the meeting, he said he was now frustrated to learn, by way of a conclusive new federal review, that banks were not providing required relief to many borrowers. “He was clearly disappointed,” said one participant in the meeting, “to realize the problem was worse than he thought.”
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(Let them eat cake he said) This man made millions suffer: Tim Geithner's sorry legacy on housing Forget the book tour designed to polish his legacy. Tim Geithner's record on housing will forever live in infamy David Dayen May 14, 2014 3:45PM (UTC) As Salon pointed out yesterday, Bush-era economist and Romney advisor Glenn Hubbard claims former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner lied in his book "Stress Test," when describing a conversation from 2012 about Hubbard supporting tax increases. But while the he said/she said doesn’t interest me, a separate, throwaway statement by Hubbard does matter — in fact, it tells you plenty about Geithner and his policy preferences during Obama’s first term. “I saw some of the excerpts about housing and I must say I split my side in laughter because Tim Geithner personally and actively opposed mortgage refinancing, constantly,” Hubbard told Politico. “And now he’s claiming this would be a great idea in the country.” We aren’t obligated to believe Hubbard here, especially because his recollection of the tax conversation is probably misleading, if not untrue. And unfortunately, Hubbard declined to elaborate when I asked him for more detail. However, we have a ton of public information available to inform the debate over Geithner and housing. When Hubbard talks about refinancing, he’s being very specific. He co-wrote a plan in 2008 endorsing mass refinancing through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as a economic stimulus, getting homeowners reduced monthly payments. This was one of the major fiscal policy tools available to the Administration that didn’t require additional spending — the Federal Reserve had lowered interest rates, it was merely up to Fannie and Freddie to take advantage of it. But in the early years of the crisis, the White House did little. Brad DeLong backs up Hubbard on this point, saying he never got a satisfactory answer for the lack of mass refinancing. It took until 2012, just coincidentally an election year, for the administration to remove blockages on their key refinancing program (the Home Affordable Refinancing Program, or HARP). In an interview with Ezra Klein, Geithner plays the classic three-card monte trick of taking credit for every single refinance in the entire country, a number surpassing 20 million. In reality, HARP just hit 3 million refis this February, with the overwhelming majority of them coming after 2012. In the darkest years of the recovery, failing to engage in mass refinancing, particularly for those underwater homeowners (who owed more on their houses than they were worth) who couldn’t get a refi without government assistance, really missed an opportunity to put more money in homeowner’s pockets that would get spent. On the more critical issue of helping homeowners stay in their homes, Geithner looks even worse. One smoking gun in the debate is the continued presence, throughout the Geithner tenure, of Ed DeMarco, a Bush-era official running the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the conservator for Fannie and Freddie. DeMarco blocked both refinancing for underwater borrowers and principal reductions for struggling homeowners, seen as the strongest and most sustainable way to keep people in their homes. The administration made no effort to remove DeMarco from his post despite claiming to be at odds with his policies. In reality, Geithner made the same arguments as DeMarco against principal reduction, most explicitly in a hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel in December 2009, arguing it would be “dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, [and] create much greater risk of unfairness.” Geithner later cited the potential moral hazard of “strategic default,” where homeowners would intentionally not pay their mortgage to get a principal reduction (something that never has and never would happen), to argue against making such modifications mandatory when they made sense for the investor and the borrower. Keep in mind that this was the guy who handed hundreds of billions of dollars over to banks with basically no strings attached, suddenly worried about fairness when homeowners get a break on their mortgage payments. The White House was certainly chilled by the Rick Santelli rant about “the loser’s mortgages,” and mindful of giving money to the “wrong” people, but that was a political problem, one that could be solved by a stronger economic recovery, like through preventing foreclosures. In his book, Geithner says that “I don’t think a more compliant FHFA would have produced a dramatically different result,” meaning that whatever differences existed between the administration and DeMarco were immaterial. In fact, the thrust of Geithner’s argument on housing in the book is that the administration did the best they could possibly do, that the alternatives were impractical or unwise, and that ultimately their efforts prevented 5 million foreclosures. This is another three-card monte trick, taking credit for every single mortgage modification, including ones not aided by the government’s HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program) incentive payments. Even modifications that later went into default get counted as “preventing” a foreclosure under Geithner’s math. For context, there are currently not even 1 million permanent HAMP modifications. Here are a few points to puncture holes in that balloon. On January 15, 2009, Larry Summers wrote a letter to Congressional leaders, promising a “sweeping effort to address the foreclosure crisis,” including a measure to “reform our bankruptcy laws.” This letter was critical to getting the second tranche of bailout money for the banks out of Congress, and yet afterwards, the administration gave little more than token support for the bankruptcy reform, known as “cram-down,” which would have allowed judges to modify terms of primary residence mortgages. Geithner admits in his book that “I didn’t think cram-down was a particularly wise or effective strategy,” meaning that, unless you believe Geithner played no role in administration decisions, the economic team effectively lied to Congress about cram-down to get the bailout money. Geithner elaborates about cram-down to Klein, saying you would still have to go through a broken servicing industry and the court system to get it done, showing that he has no understanding of the value of cram-down whatsoever. The point, as the Cleveland Federal Reserve makes clear, wasn’t to actually use the bankruptcy process, it was to keep it in reserve it as a threat, to force banks toward modifications instead of a unilateral write-down administered by a judge. The point was increasing leverage for homeowners, and it’s not surprising Geithner wouldn’t grasp that. As for their foreclosure program, HAMP, being the best available option, Barney Frank got Hank Paulson to concede to get the banks to reduce mortgage balanaces in December 2008, as long as the Obama transition team would ask for it. “We tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it,” Frank told New York Magazine. Similarly, despite all kinds of evidence of servicers abusing borrowers through HAMP and using the program as a predatory lending scheme to push people into foreclosure, Geithner’s Treasury Department never sanctioned a single mortgage servicer for failing to meet program guidelines, and never clawed back a dollar of incentive payments. Geithner acknowledges servicer incompetence, but when he had the chance, he did nothing about it. Contrary to Geithner’s opinion, there were other options. Glenn Hubbard, among others, suggested a modern-day version of the New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, which bought up mortgages at a discount, reworked them for borrowers, and took a piece of equity when home prices rebounded. Geithner protests that this would be terribly expensive and complex, yet somehow, hedge funds and community-oriented capital groups are doing it right now. The discount on the mortgages would have been higher at the depths of the crisis, meaning a cheaper cost and higher returns at a scale that would have made a real difference. Sorry for the Vox-like explainer on all this, but I hope you can see the fact pattern I’ve built here. At every turn on housing — on mass refinancing, on principal reduction, on leverage for homeowners in the bankruptcy process, on forcing banks to write down mortgages, on a modern-day HOLC — the evidence points to Tim Geithner preferring whatever option put the least pressure on banks, rather than actually helping ordinary people. He made far more excuses to do nothing than any effort to make a difference. In fact, the programs were never meant to help homeowners, designed only to “foam the runway” for the banks, to spread out foreclosures and allow banks to absorb them. Homeowners are the foam being crushed by a jumbo jet in that analogy, squeezed for as many payments as possible before ultimately losing their home. And I don’t have to just focus on housing; this is indicative of Geithner’s worldview, which sees protecting the financial system at all costs as the only thing that matters. His pride refuses to allow him to acknowledge mistakes, and the impact on millions of Americans. Even as he says in the book “I wish we had expanded our housing programs earlier,” he completely contradicts that to Andrew Ross Sorkin, saying the statement is “unicorny” and only makes sense “if we had no constraints on resources or authority.” The constraints, of course, were all generated by Geithner. Geithner admits in the book a “frustration with the populist left.” But the ideological shading obscures the debate. Geithner’s problem isn’t with populists; it’s with the millions of Americans who suffered for his policies. (Note: Timothy Geithner was asked for comment through his publisher, but was not made available. The offer still stands.)
"....But Trump slept with a porn-star." _________________________________ The big banks, the creators of the financial crisis, were bailed out and are now making record profits. Those most victimized by the economic downturn, blacks-and black women in particular-were saddled with haphazardly created programs that have not lived up to their promises. Staggering Loss of Black Wealth Due to Subprime Scandal Continues Unabated Two years after we last investigated the the foreclosure crisis in the most affluent black county in America, things aren't exactly looking up—except, maybe, for the banks. OCTOBER 13, 2014 Driving through Prince George's County, Maryland, it's not obvious that its towns and cities are at the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in the Washington, D.C., region. In the town of Bowie, for instance, large colonial-style homes with attached two-car garages, spacious apartment buildings designed for families, and modern shopping centers line the streets. As in any other middle-class community, school-aged children chase each other in front yards while their parents monitor from the porch, and twentysomethings in workout gear jog the tree-lined streets. There's no shortage of schools, community centers and places of worship, and if any homes are abandoned, it's not glaringly obvious. What sets Prince George's County apart from other upscale regions is that most of its citizens are black. No other majority-black counties in the United States are even comparable in terms of numbers of educated citizens and middle-class incomes, but when the economy crumbled, so did the dreams of many homeowners living in Prince George's. And despite promises of help by President Barack Obama and lawmakers, seven years after the housing bubble burst, the county's foreclosure crisis has only slowed, not abated. Prince George's County Government As the wealthiest black-majority county in the United States, Prince George's has long represented the pinnacle of black success. The county's median household income is $73,568-a full $20,000 more than the median household income of the United States as a whole. Only 7.1 percent of U.S. firms are black-owned, but in Prince George's that number stands at a whopping 54.5 percent. A full 29.5 percent of people over the age of 25 hold bachelor's degrees-slightly higher than the 28.5 percent rate for all persons in the United States. Known colloquially as just P.G., the county is filled with lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and federal employees. In popular lore, Prince George's was proof that, while blacks still lagged behind in education, wealth and employment, the black community was finally catching up. But in 2007, the bursting of the housing bubble triggered an economic recession that rippled throughout the global economy. For years, the housing market had been booming; in 2007 the U.S. median price for a house hit a record high of $247,900. By 2009, though, that number had fallen to $216,700. For Prince George's County, however, the decline was much more stark. In 2009 the median price for a house dropped by nearly $100,000, from $343,000 to just $245,000. Although the foreclosure crisis left no part of the country untouched, in the Washington, D.C., area-which, overall, weathered the crisis well-Prince George's County bore the brunt. The reason? Subprime lending. RealtyTrac A subprime mortgage is a loan that carries a higher interest rate than prime mortgages. Prime mortgages are often given to lenders with the best credit histories, while subprime mortgages are designed for borrowers with flawed credit histories. The higher interest rate that comes with subprime mortgages is intended to pay the lender for taking on a risky borrower. In 2009, one quarter of all mortgages in Prince George's County were subprime. By 2011, the foreclosure rate in Prince George's county had reached 5.3 percent, twice the rate for the Washington, D.C., region overall. Approximately 15 percent of homeowners in Prince George's County received notices of intent to foreclose (NOI) that year. On average, the median borrower receiving an NOI was 79 days behind on his or her mortgage payment, and owed an average of $6,400 in late mortgage payments, as well as fees and penalties. Across the nation, black homeowners were disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis, with more than 240,000 blacks losing homes they had owned. Black homeowners in the D.C. region were 20 percent more likely to lose their homes compared to whites with similar incomes and lifestyles. (See the December 2012 issue of The American Prospect, "The Collapse of Black Wealth," by Monica Potts.) The foreclosure crisis also affected blacks of all income brackets; high-earning blacks were 80 percent more likely to lose their homes than their white counterparts, making the homeowners of Prince George's County prime targets. (AP Photo/Rob Carr, File) In this Jan. 12, 2010, file photo, Wells Fargo customer Malinda Lievers of Edgewood, Maryland, signs paperwork on a loan mortgage modification, at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore. The dismal results of Obama's mortgage aid program now raise doubts about whether the government can fix the housing crisis. Even the most stable of P.G. County homeowners wound up with subprime mortgages, presumably made to believe that subprime was their only option. Not even a good credit score would have spared blacks from these discriminatory lending practices. The Center for Responsible Lending found that during the housing boom, 6.2 percent of whites with a credit score of 660 and higher received high-interest mortgages but 21.4 percent of blacks with a score of 660 or higher received these same loans. It turned out that several of the major banks had been purposely giving people of color subprime mortgages, including borrowers who would have qualified for a prime loan. The City of Baltimore took Wells Fargo to court, bringing some of the banking giant's abhorrent lending practices to light. One former employee testified that in 2001, Wells Fargo created a unit that would be responsible for pushing expensive refinance loans on black customers, especially those living in Baltimore, southeast Washington, D.C., and Prince George's County-all locations with large black populations. (AP Photo/ Gail Burton) According to court testimony, some of the loan officers at Wells Fargo spoke of these subprime loans as "ghetto loans," and referred to their black customers as "mud people." There was even a cash incentive for loan officers to aggressively market subprime mortgages in minority neighborhoods. In the end, the Justice Department found that 4,500 homeowners in Baltimore and the Washington, D.C., region that had been affected by these flat-out racist lending practices. Specifically targeted for subprime loans among the minority demographic were black women. Women of color are the most likely to receive subprime loans while white men are the least likely; the disparity grows with income levels. Compared to white men earning the same level of income, black women earning less than the area median income are two and a half times more likely to receive subprime. Upper-income black women were nearly five times more likely to receive subprime purchase mortgages than upper-income white men. The services of data collection agencies made it easy for lenders who were able to buy information about a potential borrower's age, race and income. Armed with that information, it was easy for lenders to target moderate-to-high income women of color. Without admitting to any wrongdoing, Wells Fargo finally settled with the City of Baltimore in 2012. Still, Wells Fargo agreed to pay to the tune of $175 million dollars; $50 million of the settlement went towards helping community members in the Washington, D.C., region, as well as those in seven other metropolitan areas, make down payments on new homes. The settlement, however, was hardly a fix for the loss of family wealth suffered by those who lost their homes. Urban Institute Family wealth describes all the assets of a family: the members' financial holdings, their property, and any businesses they may own. For many homeowning families, the home comprises most of the family's wealth. When such a family loses its home, other forms of wealth-savings, stock shares-are often used to cover the costs of the crisis. In the Great Recession, according to a working paper by Signe-Mary McKernan and colleagues for the Urban Institute, the wealth of U.S. families overall was reduced by 28.5 percent. But for blacks, the authors found, the decline was far greater: a loss of 47.6 percent. The relative lack of black wealth is a complex problem with roots going back to slavery, exacerbated by decades of institutional racism. In 2010, the median wealth for white families was $124,000; for black families it was a mere $16,000, according to the Urban Institute. As blacks moved into the middle class, the housing boom held out the promise of a chance to build prosperity. The wealth gap between blacks and whites was by no means created by the recession, but after the economy collapsed, the gap worsened drastically. From 2005 to 2009, the net worth of black households declined by 53 percent while the net worth of white households declined by 16 percent, according to Social & Demographic Trends researchers at the Pew Research Center. At the peak of the housing boom, 49 percent of blacks owned homes while the same measure for whites hovered around 75 percent. Historically, the wealth gap between whites and blacks can be traced back to the ability to own land; for a number of years blacks were prohibited from owning land, and once homeownership became the primary way to own property black people were often barred from that, too. In response to the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Administration was created through the National Housing Act of 1934. The purpose of the FHA was to regulate interest rates and mortgage terms. While this new government agency created an opportunity for whites to become homeowners and begin accumulating wealth, government-sanctioned racism kept blacks out of the housing market. The FHA regularly denied mortgages to black people and limited loans to new residential areas on the outskirts of the city , where the white population tended to live; this contributed to the decay of inner city neighborhoods as middle-class residents left to build new homes in the suburbs. Federal policy also dictated that the home values of predominantly black neighborhoods were to be lower than in neighborhoods that were mostly white. Even though that law is no longer on the books, its legacy remains: Homes in black neighborhoods still have lower values than homes in white neighborhoods with similar incomes. Pew Research Center/Social & Demographic Trends The Federal Housing Administration also practiced redlining, the practice in which lenders would deny or limit financial services based on race, regardless of other financial qualifications. The term redlining comes from the practice of drawing red lines on maps to mark the black neighborhoods where banks would not invest. The FHA was firm in its racial bias; in one of its publications, the agency even declared that neighborhoods should not be racially integrated. Finally, by 1968 as part of the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act was implemented. It was a victory for blacks nationwide, but the damage had already been done. While white families had been building wealth for decades, blacks found themselves behind. In the years after housing act's passage, the wealth gap would certainly shrink, but never come close to closing. In the 1970s, black migration from Washington, D.C., to Prince George's County began to pick up speed. As developers created suburban landscapes out of the farms of this once-rural area, black families began moving to Prince George's from the city to enjoy the lower housing costs. In response, real estate agents began practicing what is known as blockbusting, selling a house to a black family then urging all the white families to move out because the presence blacks in the neighborhood would allegedly cause property values to decline. Economic Policy Institute/Algernon Austin The blockbusting era coincided with the integration of schools in Prince George's County, which began in 1973 with a court-mandated busing plan. The desegregation of the schools led to a massive white flight-the term given to describe extensive white out-migration from neighborhoods in response to blacks begin to moving in. All of these factors led to Prince George's becoming a majority-black county. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the black population in Prince George's continued to grow; the housing values did not plummet as real estate agents had predicted. Instead, the county grew wealthier. By purchasing homes, black homeowners began to gain their own wealth, thinking to ensure wealth for their children. Passing down wealth through homes has long been a practice of the middle class. The foreclosure crisis not only caused blacks to lose their homes and their slice of the American dream; it will also present new challenges to the next generation as the likelihood of receiving wealth passed down from their parents is disappearing very quickly. When it comes to inherited wealth, blacks often don't receive any, according to Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute's Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. Often, Wilson told me in an interview in her Washington, D.C., office, the home is the only substantial asset a black family has, and many will use their homes to finance the education of their children, or retirement for the homeowners, who, by the time they've reached the end of their lives, consequently have very little accumulated wealth. After the economic crash and subsequent subprime meltdown, the closing of the wealth gap between blacks and whites, which accelerated during the housing boom, began to reverse, eroding years of progress-and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix the problem. "I don't think you can do it with any one thing," said Wilson. "The most immediate [solution] would be a transfer of cash-reparations-but even with that I don't know that the gap would stay closed." Inequities exist in much more than just wealth; there are also disparities in education, wages and employment, she explained. "All of these things would still eat away at wealth, even if we could wipe the slate clean and equalize. We'd really have to address structural racism and inequality in this country." As the foreclosure crisis continued to eat away at black wealth, the Obama administration introduced a couple of programs intended to alleviate the suffering of homeowners. The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was created to provide eligible homeowners with loan modifications on their mortgage debt. This program is designed to provide relief to borrowers who are facing foreclosure. To meet eligibility requirements, applicants must prove financial hardship, have obtained their mortgage on or before January 1, 2009; owe no more than $729,750 on their primary residences or a one-to-four unit rental property; and, finally, applicants must not have been "convicted in the last 10 years of felony larceny, theft, fraud, or forgery, money laundering or tax evasion, in connection with a mortgage or real estate transaction." If HAMP is helping Prince George's homeowners, it's certainly not helping enough. The program is widely considered a failure. Nationwide, 1.3 million people received loan modifications, but 350,000 of those people again defaulted on their mortgages and lost their homes. In the Washington, D.C., metro area, the redefault rate was at 26 percent in mid-2013. North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry sought to address the program's shortcomings by introducing the HAMP Termination Act of 2011. But Representative Donna Edwards, who represents the 4th Congressional District of Maryland, comprising parts of Prince George's County and neighboring Anne Arundel County, was in no mood to give up. In a speech on the House floor arguing against McHenry's measure, Edwards spoke of how the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, part of HAMP, provided $12 million dollars to Prince George's County, helping communities in her district resell abandoned homes. She lamented that the HAMP program wasn't able to help as many homeowners as it originally planned, but felt that doing away with the program altogether was an injustice to her constituents, and struggling homeowners nationwide. McHenry's measure passed the House, but never saw a vote in the Senate. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson) Three years later, the congresswoman still remains firm in her support for HAMP. "Some of my colleagues don't want to expand programs that would give relief to homeowners," Edwards explained in a telephone interview, "but I'm a big fan of that, because these are people who are getting up and going to work every day, and we need them in the economy. And part of them being in the economy is being able to pay their mortgages." When a homeowner applies for loan modification, the application must first go through the bank. Edwards told the Prospect that the slow processing of loan modification applications is making the foreclosure crisis worse on homeowners in her district. "The banks are taking forever to respond, and by the time they do, the fees and expenses add up," she said. "The homeowner is in more of a bind, sometimes waiting a year to get the paperwork straightened out." Not only are late fees adding up; some homeowners are still stuck paying their old mortgages while waiting for a resolution. Edwards's staff find themselves fielding calls from desperate constituents who are stymied by the banks' glacial pace in processing paperwork. When the congressional office calls the bank with the same request as the homeowner, the process is suddenly sped up, Edwards said, proving that the process for evaluating applications could easily be improved. "I do think that there has to be some kind of accountability mechanism placed on the banks," Edwards said. "Some accountability for what the banks are doing, and how fast they're doing it, would be really helpful for homeowners." It's been six years since the beginning of the foreclosure crisis and five years since the recession technically ended and the recovery period began. Nationally, the foreclosure crisis is easing. But in Maryland foreclosures recently hit a high. Initially, Maryland was in 16th place in number of foreclosures, but by 2013, the state had skyrocketed to third in the nation; the number of filings increased by a staggering 250 percent between 2013 and 2014 with Prince George's County seeing a 50 percent increase of foreclosure in this year. The new wave of foreclosures is not a new crisis but a continuation of the old one. In 2011 and 2012, the rate of foreclosures in Maryland slowed, but this was the result of a new law that went into effect on July 1, 2010. Placing pressure on lenders, the Foreclosure Mediation Law created a new timeline for home foreclosures. Under the new law, when a lender notifies a homeowner of the possibility of foreclosure, the lender is also required to provide information on loan modifications, or any other type of assistance. The mediation law created a backlog and Maryland is just now beginning to see all the foreclosures that were previously stalled. The original intention of the law was to help members of the community stay in their homes, but instead, for many, it appears to merely put a pause on foreclosures. The recent uptick in foreclosures led to a bill sponsored by State Senator Anthony Muse, a Democrat representing Prince George's 26th legislative district that would place a moratorium on all home foreclosures in Maryland. The bill also called for legal examinations of those who were foreclosed on illegally. The bill is still pending. It's safe to say that the foreclosure crisis is nowhere near over for Prince George's County. The big banks, the creators of the financial crisis, were bailed out and are now making record profits. Those most victimized by the economic downturn, blacks-and black women in particular-were saddled with haphazardly created programs that have not lived up to their promises. As Prince George's County continues to suffer from the foreclosure crisis, the loss of wealth by so many of its residents is felt far beyond its borders. For those still within those borders, it must be asked, when will these homeowners begin to see real relief?
I dont wonder why Trump won Vanny.His opponent got millions more votes than him so we know its not because The American people wanted him to win.
My name is Tony Stark. I am effeminate and HAVE low T. I want to vote Democrat but all the D HAVE very low T. I may have to vote for TRUMP. TRUMP IS STRONG. And everything so far has proved that. Demos are very, very, WEAK. They can not even decide who they are voting for. I AM A DEMOCRATIC AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM VOTING FOR. IT IS VERY EMBARRAISSING .
My name is Tony Stark. My T reading is very low. I quote all kinds of long passages because I am really not that smart. I hope Democrats win because they are not smart and that does not make me feel so bad. I am not smart and Democrats are not smart. I like that. Dumb is good for everyone.
My name is Tony Stark. I say I am a Demo but I have no idea who I would vote for. I am weak. I will vote for who ever is weak. A weak America is best for the rest of the world.