WEEKEND EDITION, OCTOBER 22 OCTOBER 26, 2012

MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

Doubts About Independent Foreclosure Review Spread The idea behind the Independent Foreclosure Review seems simple. During the peak of the foreclosure crisis, the banks broke laws and made errors that hurt homeowners. In response, the government mandated they compensate the victims. But there is growing evidence some banks are playing a major role in identifying the victims of their own abuses, raising the question of whether the review is compromised by conflicts of interest.

Foreclosures: "The fact of the matter is we are in a period of lawlessness," Holmes, a Santa Rosa real estate broker and foreclosure expert, shared her housing knowledge with a group of 20 -- people facing foreclosure or who already have lost their homes -- gathered Thursday for a Felton town hall meeting aimed at helping folks keep their homes. Many of the country and state's foreclosures in the past few years have been done fraudulently by big banks and investment firms, she said.

Direct or Indirect, Mortgages Are Flawed Given this landscape, why did banks determine that it was acceptable to shareholder interests to disregard due diligence and other legal standards? Consider the risks the banks heaped on their shareholders (especially our pensions and state investments) by neglecting their legal obligations during the inflation of the most recent housing bubble. The same arrogance, ignorance and greed that inflated the bubble also popped it, but the Feds desperately low interest rates.

VA Developer Sentenced To Prison For Bank Fraud And Tax Scam Todays sentence brings justice and holds Eric Menden accountable for defrauding TARP applicant Bank of the Commonwealth for three years in an elaborate tit-for-tat scheme with bank insiders that contributed to the failure of the bank,. Gambling potential foreclosures can earn enough money from the Section 8 federal housing vouchers Here's an odd side effect of South Florida's foreclosure crisis: Some immense homes with pools and three-car garages in gated communities are being rented out to unlikely tenants poor people paying with Section 8 aid. Among the properties are homes with up to 4,500 square feet of space in private communities with guardhouses and regal names such as "Monarch Lakes" and "Bellagio at Vizcaya.".

QE3 Helps the Speculators in Housing. This Will End Badly There is a housing bubble forming in places like Sparks, NV, and in Phoenix and I am sure many other places. This bubble is caused by banks lending money out to the wealthy and hedge funds. I have written about this before. The 1 percent are still buying up all the real estate. Foreclosure mills in the clear, state closes cases with no findings Floridas attorney general has closed a highprofile investigation into alleged wrongdoing by the states largest foreclosure law firms with no findings. The probes, opened by former attorney general Bill McCollum in 2010, ended not with the swiftness of a gavel falling, but in a slow fizzle of court judgments, law firm implosions and the firing of two top state investigators by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Renters In Foreclosure The foreclosure crisis has taken its toll on renters in Baltimore. According to The Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition, from 2009-2011, about 50% of all foreclosures filings were on rental properties. WYPRs Mary Rose Madden has this report about the realities many face when their landlord is foreclosed upon. Mary Rose Madden: Deirdre Peace paid about seven hundred dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Northwood. One day in late August someone knocked on her door.
>>>>>>> Mortgage Seizure Via Eminent Domain For Community Stabilization Debate And News Updated Daily http://paper.li/EmDomainDebate/1342319964

WEEKEND EDITION, OCTOBER 22 OCTOBER 26, 2012

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

NY Supreme Court, HSH Vs. Barclays, Consolidated Complaint Page 5: 3. Through investigation of a large sample of publicly recorded mortgage documents, Plaintiffs have discovered that more than 99% of the mortgages in each of the three Securitizations were improperly or never assigned. In particular, many of these mortgages remain in the name of the loans originator or its nominee, and have never been assigned to the Trusts. While others were purportedly assigned to the Trusts, this was long after the securities were issued, contrary to the representations in the Offering Documents. Similarly, the promissory notes were not properly assigned in approximately 81.9% of the sampled loans.

NJ Assembly Schedules Wed Hearing on Christie Failure to Help More Families Facing Foreclosure Two Assembly committees will meet jointly on Wednesday to examine the Christie administrations failure to help more families facing foreclosure. New Jersey has the nations second highest foreclosure rate, but questions have been raised about the inability of the Christie administration to help out more families with $300 million in federal foreclosure aid given to the state. Officers Of AZ Mortgage Originator Plead Guilty To $27 Million Fraud Against TARP Recipient Powers, McMaster, and their alleged coconspirator took advantage of BNC National Bank receiving $20 million in TARP funds to defraud BNC out of more than $27 million in a scheme engineered to cover their losses from the downturn in the housing market, said Special Inspector General Romero. They used BNC as their personal piggy bank, and the bank was unable to pay millions of dollars in TARP.

Federal Program Offers Foreclosure Help NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - The federal Making Home Affordable Program will be offering free help for homeowners who are at risk of foreclosure. The event offers homeowners the chance to meet face-to-face with their mortgage company and a counseling agency approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to work on a solution to help them stay in their home. It will take place on Wednesday at the Nashville Convention Center from 1:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eminent Domain of Mortgage Securities: The Other Side In our continuing coverage of Mortgage Resolution Partners (MRP) effort to facilitate local governments use of eminent domain to stem the mortgage crisis, today we present the other side specifically, the comments submitted to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) by the American Securitization Forum (ASF) on September 7. The ASF is a professional forum with over 330 members, including issuers, investors, servicers, ratings agencies, and other

Foreclosure crisis caused by "bubble fever" not lack of data The foreclosure crisis was not the result of exploding option ARMs, poor housing policies or a lack of data. Instead, Paul Willen, senior economist and policy advisor for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, blames it on a type of bubble fever that infected borrowers and financial institutions alike.

FHFA proposes framework for new GSE securitization platform The Federal Housing Finance Agency proposed a framework for a common securitization platform and a model pooling and servicing agreement. The agency is seeking input from the public until Dec. 3. The plan, originally announced in February, is intended to repair the nation's mortgage finance space.

Fighting Off Foreclosure: One Woman's Three-Year Ordeal When even a single home goes into foreclosure, the effects can be far reaching. In the case of Dee, when she faced foreclosure on her home in Prince George's County, Maryland, the potential hardship extended well beyond her immediate family. Dee's home not only shelters some of her six children and occasionally her four grandchildren, but is also a place of refuge for neighbors, friends, and sometimes complete strangers who need a roof over their heads.
>>>>>>> Mortgage Seizure Via Eminent Domain For Community Stabilization Debate And News Updated Daily http://paper.li/EmDomainDebate/1342319964

WEEKEND EDITION, OCTOBER 22 OCTOBER 26, 2012

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

Home Foreclosures Missing From Presidential Debates During the presidential debates, President Obama and Mitt Romney successfully avoided (with an assist from the debate moderators) addressing several prominent issues, including climate change, gun control, drone strikes, poverty and the housing crisis. While the candidates occasionally discussed these gravely important issues in an indirect wayObama mentioned folks who are striving to get into the middle class," Mitt Romney paid homage to the poor by promising to make the social safety net "more efficient" i.e. privatize it.

CFPB Report on Student Loan Servicing Shows Same Predatory Tactics as Mortgage Servicing The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released an eye-opening report on student lending late last week that got me thinking about a simple truth I think I had overlooked previously. Ive documented for well over a year the extent to which mortgage servicers make their profits almost entirely through ripping off their customers, adding on unnecessary fees, and basically using opaque processes to skim money off the top.

Foreclosures: The Scam Continues For millions of Americans, owning a home is the grandest symbol of accomplishment into the illusion of the American Dream. In the United states, we have been indoctrinated to believe being a homeowner signifies success, financial stability and responsibility. My former husband and I had been renters a few years before the thought ever crossed our minds to look into the prospect of home-ownership. Mostly out of curiosity, we decided to meet with a mortgage lender to see what qualifications (if any) we had and see what the whole lending process.

Saving Homes, Saving Cities: Fixing the Mortgage Crisis Locally Various cities across the country are considering the use of eminent domain to purchase underwater mortgages. Under the proposal, cities would use eminent domain to condemn the underwater mortgages (not the underlying property), at which point the city would purchase the loans for market value and refinance the loans to the homeowner at a principle balance equal to the current market value of the home.

The Rental Alternative to Foreclosure FOR homeowners who have been buffeted about by the foreclosure process, the suggestion that they willingly hand their deed to the lender and rent the home instead may only add insult to injury. But such an alternative to foreclosure variously called deed for lease or mortgage to lease is an option for a select few. Fannie Mae introduced a rent-back program in 2009, and this year, both Bank of America and CitiMortgage announced that they would try a similar.

The Boom (and Bust) That Your Mortgage Bonds Built In the 1980s, old-fashioned banks wanted big money. The kind of big money that the investment banks were making with all their feebased business. Commercial banks began asking themselves how they could get their hands on that fee money, without taking on risk. Interest income is great but it comes with an ever-present risk that the borrower might.

One-third of people say strategic defaults are acceptable Nearly one-third of people surveyed by San Diego-based ID Analytics said homeowners should be able to strategically default on their mortgages without any consequences. The survey of 1,026 adults, conducted online by JZ Analytics in September for ID Analytics, also reported 13% would likely strategically default on a mortgage and 17% know someone who has.

Battleground States and Their Housing Situation Depressed housing values, foreclosures, underwater mortgages. These terms barely touched the candidates lips in this presidential campaign. Even so, many voters will head to the polls on Election Day with the financial pain from the housing crisis still fresh on their minds. Nowhere does this matter more for President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney than the nations so-called battleground states. Heres a snapshot of the state of swing-state housing.
>>>>>>> Mortgage Seizure Via Eminent Domain For Community Stabilization Debate And News Updated Daily http://paper.li/EmDomainDebate/1342319964

WEEKEND EDITION, OCTOBER 22 OCTOBER 26, 2012

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

Housing and the Foreclosure Crisis Are Missing From the Campaign Conversation JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to another kind of look at the election. We call it Missing Issues, important topics on the American agenda that neither candidate is spending much time discussing. Tonight, our subject is housing. It was the housing bubble that helped lead to the financial crisis in 2008 and has continued to drag on the national economy. But big problems remain. More than 20 percent of U.S. homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owe more than the value of their home, and some 950,000 homes are in the process of being foreclosed on currently.

Mounting Evidence Raises Questions About Independent Foreclosure Review After three years of hand-to-hand combat with Bank of America over his home loan, Daniel Casper was more than ready to call in a neutral referee. So in January, the Illinois wedding videographer applied to the Independent Foreclosure Review, a program overseen by banking regulators that offers compensation to homeowners who show they were harmed by a mishandled foreclosure.

Bondi: Foreclosure funds not going to state employee pay raises Attorney General Pam Bondi shot down any speculation that she would let the more than $300 million the state received help fund state employee pay raises. It will not be used for pay raises if I have anything to do with it, which I do, Bondi told reporters Tuesday following a Cabinet meeting. Bondi and the Legislature have been haggling over who has the right to spend the $300 million Florida received.

Three Charged In Fraud Scheme WASHINGTON, DC - A 13-count Indictment charging Wilbur Anthony Huff, a Kentucky businessman, and Matthew L. Morris, the former Senior Vice President of Park Avenue Bank, with conspiracy to commit bank bribery, bank and insurance fraud, and theft of $2.3 million from a publicly traded company was unsealed today in Manhattan federal court. Huff, who is also charged with tax evasion, is alleged to have.

Changes in mortgage servicing to take effect A significant element of the governments historic settlement with big banks over foreclosure abuses takes effect Tuesday, when firms face a deadline for carrying out more than 300 changes in the way they service mortgages and treat struggling homeowners. Much of the hoopla surrounding this years $25 billion government settlement has focused on the banks agreement to reduce the loan balances of some borrowers.

Short sale fraud heating up, expert says As short sales become increasingly dominant in todays market, so has short sale fraud, said short sale expert Kathy Mehringer. Fraud is heating up like a wildfire right now, said Mehringer, risk management director and short sale advisor for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Sherman Oaks. Weve got to be aware that this fraud is changing directions, is jumping containment lines.

Home prices may not return to peak until 2023 Home prices are showing signs of life, but have a long way to go to make up for losses from the housing bust. U.S. home prices dropped by a third from the start of 2007 to the start of 2012, according to Fiserv, an analytics firm. Fiserv forecasts prices will bounce back an average of 3.7% a year for the next five years -- a rate that would still leave prices 20% below the peak.

Puncturing the Housing Optimism Bubble The housing bulls have really started to run wild now. One of them planted this rose-colored story in Bloomberg arguing that consumer deleveraging points to happy times ahead for the economy. The only problem is that the deleveraging comes from defaults rather than any paying down of debts. And these defaults are destructive for an economy, not a sign of hope. Its a similar story with some of the other housing fundamentals. Cullen Roche rightly points out that the housing recovery, when viewed over a longer time horizon, looks completely pathetic, and the bulls are being overcome with recency bias.
>>>>>>> Mortgage Seizure Via Eminent Domain For Community Stabilization Debate And News Updated Daily http://paper.li/EmDomainDebate/1342319964

WEEKEND EDITION, OCTOBER 22 OCTOBER 26, 2012

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

Racial Inequality and the Independent Foreclosure Review In the aftermath of our recent foreclosure crisis, its difficult to overstate what a pernicious effect predatory lending has had on minority families. By buying up subprime mortgages targeted at minorities, Wall Street firms rewarded and propped up systematic racist lending practices, all but ensuring that Black and brown families would be in the worst possible position when the financial crisis hit.

SIGTARP: Quarterly Report To Congress, October 25, 2012 SIGTARPs mission is to advance economic stability by promoting the efficiency and effectiveness of TARP management, through transparency, through coordinated oversight, and through robust enforcement against those, whether inside or outside of Government, who waste, steal, or abuse TARP funds.

SOS: Sustaining Our Society SOS: Sustaining Our Society is a documentary based on the dissertation by Dr. Imran Farooq called Private Partnership for Public Benefit. The model is focused on the Sustainable 62nd Assembly District the region representing San Bernardino, Fontana, Rialto, Colton, Bloomington & Muscoy.

New York Area Has Foreclosure Filings

Biggest

Jump

in

Zillow Adds 1.8M Foreclosed And PreForeclosure Homes To Its Real Estate Listings Online real estate service Zillow is expanding its real estate listings today by adding pre-market inventory specifically, homes that have either been foreclosed or are in the foreclosure process. Increasing the selection of available homes is particularly important now, Zillow says, because the inventory of for-sale homes listed on the site has fallen by 20 percent over the past year (which the company argues is an indicator of the larger market).

The 69 percent gain in default, auction and repossession filings was the steepest among the 20 largest metro areas, according to RealtyTrac Inc. The regions increase, propelled by a ninefold rise in Queens County, New York, and a more than tripling in Sussex County, New Jersey, ran counter to the national trend. Filings declined from a year earlier in more than threefifths of U.S. metro areas, the Irvine, Californiabased data provider said today.

Seniors in foreclosures

San

Joaquin

Valley

face

Attorney Accused of Renting Foreclosure Clients Home to Section 8 Tenant for His Own Benefit An Illinois lawyer is facing a legal ethics case that alleges he rented a foreclosure client's house in suburban Chicago without permission, misrepresenting himself as the owner to the Housing Authority of Joliet to collect about $20,000 in rent from the federally funded Section 8 subsidized housing program. In a Sept. 20 complaint, the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission alleges that Joseph P.

Its not news to residents of the eight-county San Joaquin Valley that the area has been hard hit economically since 2008, when the housing bubble deflated. Many neighborhoods show signs of neglect as people unable to meet their mortgage obligations lose their homes to foreclosure. Among those facing this prospect in the central part of the state are a growing number of older homeowners. Exactly how many is hard to pin down.

Home Prices Unlikely to Come Roaring Back, Case Says U.S. home prices, which climbed more than forecast in July, are unlikely to come roaringback as the housing market reaches bottom, according to Karl Case, the economist who co-created the S&P/Case-Shiller index. The gauge of property values in 20 cities rose 1.2 percent from July 2011, the biggest 12-month jump since August 2010, a report from the group showed today in New York. The median forecast of 23 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 1.1 percent gain.
>>>>>>> Mortgage Seizure Via Eminent Domain For Community Stabilization Debate And News Updated Daily http://paper.li/EmDomainDebate/1342319964