Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Louise Wu on August 14, 2011 at 6:51am

Here's the text of a reply I sent to Mark who made some similar comments to yours:

It is difficult to see the forest for the trees sometimes.  Conventional wisdom would dictate that these folks would have been fine if they'd just paid their bills.  If that's all there was to the issue, then it is doubtful that so many community members would be involved in stopping the in justice of what's happening.   The sad fact is that the banks holding the mortgages participated in fraudulent loan and investment schemes which became insolvent and had to be bailed out by the taxpayers with billions of dollars.  The understanding was that in return for themselves being bailed out for not being able to meet their obligations, they would re-negotiate the mortgages and keep people in their houses.  Instead what happened is that the banks foreclosed on record numbers of properties in order to receive the insurance on the houses.  With these homeowners and mortgage holders, it is well known and documented that the banks would not accept payments or communicate with them.   My neighbor on Ravenwood had the means to pay her mortgage and retained two private attorneys from the beginning that the problems started with the bank and the now infamous Countrywide, after her husband died without a will and they returned her payments because her name was not yet on the deed.  She did as much to rectify the situation immediately and took the steps any of us would.  But her two attorneys could not get anywhere with the insolvent Countrywide and then Fannie Mae.  To make matters worse, Fannie Mae was employing the now legendary Stephen J. Baum esq. of foreclosure factory robo-signing fame.  His firm in Buffalo, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues by doing high volumes of foreclosure litigation in NY state, also uses the stonewalling tactic of not communicating with the homeowners.  Indeed they did not talk with my neighbor until she was in the national press and the Center for Constitutional Rights in NY city was calling them on her behalf.  So the kind of advocacy she's receiving at the moment is the only thing that has gotten her anywhere.  The people in the press conference video may have been upset about what the police did on Appleton.  That is their prerogative.  But there is nothing at all unreasonable about asking the police and city marshal to reconsider their level of involvement in these issues considering the scope and scale of the fraud taking place.  The lady on Appleton's case is even worse because she never received any summons to come to court for an eviction hearing.  So there was no due process.  This is a complex issue.  That is certain.  But because Rochester is being exploited heavily by these banks and unscrupulous law firms with these unlawful evictions (we have over half the number of evictions per year of a city the size of Boston), it is doubtful that people are going to quiet down about it any time soon.  At the rate these foreclosures are going, many will be made homeless unnecessarily, and our neighborhoods will look like the abandoned sections of Detroit.  It's had to believe that with an understanding of the situation, that anyone in the neighborhood would want this to continue.

 

Additionally, we have also found that Empire Justice, and Legal Aid, although both work on this issue, and EJ does extensive publicity attesting to that, do not want to be involved.  I understand from Joan that this has something to do with losing funding and personnel.  But in the case of legal aid, they withdrew representation in the Hall of Justice 20 minutes before my neighbor went to court, and the judge harangued her for appearing without a lawyer.   This is really outrageous.   

Permalink Reply by Louise Wu on August 14, 2011 at 6:01am

It is difficult to see the forest for the trees sometimes.  Conventional wisdom would dictate that these folks would have been fine if they'd just paid their bills.  If that's all there was to the issue, then it is doubtful that so many community members would be involved in stopping the in justice of what's happening.   The sad fact is that the banks holding the mortgages participated in fraudulent loan and investment schemes which became insolvent and had to be bailed out by the taxpayers with billions of dollars.  The understanding was that in return for themselves being bailed out for not being able to meet their obligations, they would re-negotiate the mortgages and keep people in their houses.  Instead what happened is that the banks foreclosed on record numbers of properties in order to receive the insurance on the houses.  With these homeowners and mortgage holders, it is well known and documented that the banks would not accept payments or communicate with them.   My neighbor on Ravenwood had the means to pay her mortgage and retained two private attorneys from the beginning that the problems started with the bank and the now infamous Countrywide, after her husband died without a will and they returned her payments because her name was not yet on the deed.  She did as much to rectify the situation immediately and took the steps any of us would.  But her two attorneys could not get anywhere with the insolvent Countrywide and then Fannie Mae.  To make matters worse, Fannie Mae was employing the now legendary Stephen J. Baum esq. of foreclosure factory robo-signing fame.  His firm in Buffalo, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues by doing high volumes of foreclosure litigation in NY state, also uses the stonewalling tactic of not communicating with the homeowners.  Indeed they did not talk with my neighbor until she was in the national press and the Center for Constitutional Rights in NY city was calling them on her behalf.  So the kind of advocacy she's receiving at the moment is the only thing that has gotten her anywhere.  The people in the press conference video may have been upset about what the police did on Appleton.  That is their prerogative.  But there is nothing at all unreasonable about asking the police and city marshal to reconsider their level of involvement in these issues considering the scope and scale of the fraud taking place.  The lady on Appleton's case is even worse because she never received any summons to come to court for an eviction hearing.  So there was no due process.  This is a complex issue.  That is certain.  But because Rochester is being exploited heavily by these banks and unscrupulous law firms with these unlawful evictions (we have over half the number of evictions per year of a city the size of Boston), it is doubtful that people are going to quiet down about it any time soon.  At the rate these foreclosures are going, many will be made homeless unnecessarily, and our neighborhoods will look like the abandoned sections of Detroit.  It's had to believe that with an understanding of the situation, that anyone in the neighborhood would want this to continue.

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