“This is a country that is founded on the idea that civil protest, rightful protest, is something that we guarantee,” Coakley said Tuesday. “I hope everyone in Washington will pay attention to this voice of frustration.”
Medford Patch-
Martha Coakley has been paying close attention to Occupy Boston, and although there have been over 100 arrests, the protests have appeared to be mostly peaceful – and rightful, she said Tuesday.
“This is a country that is founded on the idea that civil protest, rightful protest, is something that we guarantee,” Coakley said in a brief interview Tuesday at City Hall in Medford. “I hope everyone in Washington will pay attention ot this voice of frustration.”
Two of the city’s top delinquent landlords are not landlords at all. They’re banks.
City officials said Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America owe more than $80,000 in fines for allowing many vacant properties in foreclosure to fall into disrepair and blight neighborhoods.
Yet both banks, two of the nation’s largest, question whether they are responsible for the properties and tickets. Wells Fargo representatives, for example, said they don’t even know if they own many of the homes; Wells Fargo could be servicing a foreclosure for another bank, or acting as a trustee for a giant pension fund that holds the mortgage.
Massachusetts’s highest court is poised to rule on whether foreclosures in the state should be undone because securitization-industry practices violate real- estate law governing how mortgages may be transferred.
The fight between homeowners and banks before the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston turns on whether a mortgage can be transferred without naming the recipient, a common securitization practice. Also at issue is whether the right to a mortgage follows the promissory note it secures when the note is sold, as the industry argues.
A victory for the homeowners may invalidate some foreclosures and force loan originators to buy back mortgages wrongly transferred into loan pools. Such a ruling may also be cited in other state courts handling litigation related to the foreclosure crisis.
“This is the first time the securitization paradigm is squarely before a high court,” said Marie McDonnell, a mortgage-fraud analyst in Orleans, Massachusetts, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of borrowers. The state court, under its practices, is likely to rule by next month.
Claims of wrongdoing by banks and loan servicers triggered a 50-state investigation last year into whether hundreds of thousands of foreclosures were properly documented as the housing market collapsed. The probe came after JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc. said they would stop repossessions in 23 states where courts supervise home seizures and Bank of America Corp. froze U.S. foreclosures. Massachusetts is one of 27 states where court supervision of foreclosures generally isn’t required.
IF NO sensible mortgage lender wants to foreclose on a homeowner except as a last resort, why are so many still foreclosing?
That question lies at the heart of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s proposal to require mediation before a family loses its home to foreclosure, recently passed by the City Council. If the city gets permission from the Legislature to start mandatory mediation, Boston will be on its way to preventing hundreds of avoidable foreclosures and the neighborhood deterioration that follows.
Nationally, roughly one in every seven households with a mortgage is behind on one or more mortgage payments. Moreover, with news of the “robo-signing’’ foreclosure petitions, the public has seen that lenders who were sloppy with paperwork when making the loans might be just as sloppy when calling the loans.
As a result, tens of millions of Americans are anxious about their home values; nearly 30 percent of homeowners with mortgages are drowning “underwater.’’ Even more worry about their ability to pay their mortgages. This is bad for everyone who wants the economy to recover, including those who are not in default, as home prices could plummet again while a cloud of uncertainty keeps the home-buying market perpetually overcast.
Recent Comments