I read with interest New York Times economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews’ book excerpt about how he fell behind in his mortgage payments. “I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us,” he writes. “But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds.”
By 2007, he writes of his third mortgage servicer, JPMorgan Chase, “I was actually beginning to feel sorry for Chase. It seemed to be so flooded with defaulting borrowers that it didn’t have time to foreclose on my house. Eight months after my last payment to the bank, I am still waiting for the ax to fall.”
Not everyone facing mortgage foreclosure has had it this easy.
Lawrence Mouton, a Dallas truck driver for 12 years, purchased a $95,000 home two years ago and was paying a mortgage of $900 a month — the kind of terms Washington, D.C.-area residents like Andrews would kill for. In short order, however, Mouton’s wife lost her nursing home job and the mortgage payments jumped to over $1,200 a month.
Mouton struggled to keep the lights and gas on. He took out payday loans just to keep a roof over his family’s heads.
Home Eq, the company servicing his home loan, constantly called pushing him to pay more money, even urging him to send them his mother-in-law’s Social Security check.
“They wanted anything they could get,” said Mouton, whose bedridden mother-in-law lives with the family. “I told them we used her Social Security to buy all of her medicines. After we do that, all that little money is gone.”
Mouton was able to modify the terms of his loan when the servicer agreed last fall to lower his monthly payment by a whopping $17.86.
Mouton, 51, continued to make payments, even partial ones, but fell behind on the mortgage and his home soon went into foreclosure.
It is unclear how two homeowners with the same problem got different treatment.
Maybe it’s because they have different lenders. Or maybe it’s because one is a reporter for The New York Times and the other isn’t, said Kathleen Day, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based Center for Responsible Lending.
In the current foreclosure crisis, Hispanics and black borrowers who often took on subprime loans — even when they qualified for conventional ones — are disproportionately impacted.
“It’s a maddening system,” Day said. “There are disparities and no streamlined process to make it more efficient. That’s why we think the bankruptcy fix is key to solving the current foreclosure crisis. Without it, people have no leverage.”
On April 30, the Senate rejected an amendment to a broader housing bill (
The provision in the Senate bill would have helped 1.7 million homeowners facing foreclosure and helped neighborhoods preserve some $300 billion in property value, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. The legislation enjoyed support from voters and key advocates, including Republican former congressman and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp who passed away May 2.
Twelve Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in rejecting the amendment, not because of its expense (it doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime), but because mortgage banking lobbyists argued a more appealing case.
Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin , D-Ill., — who has spent much of the past two years promoting the benefits of allowing bankruptcy judges to lower interest rates, reduce principal or stretch payment periods for struggling homeowners — blamed the defeat on lobbying efforts of the banking industry — considered by most to be politically battered after six months of federal bailouts and economic disaster.
“The big banks, JPMorgan Chase, you see them all over the United States — they were at the [negotiating] table until last week and they decided, ‘No, we will walk away, we are not interested in this conversation,’” he said. “Wells Fargo, Bank of America, the list goes on and on. If any of the names sound familiar, it is that they are surviving today because of our taxpayer dollars.”
The foreclosure language — a process referred to as “cramdown” — is in a House-passed version of the legislation (
President Obama’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has gone further than any other initiative Congress has come up with, but even it has limitations.
The plan only really got off the ground in March and many lenders still don’t have the personnel in place to handle an overwhelming number of loan modification requests. Plus, it is still voluntary, meaning lenders don’t have to participate if they don’t want to, which has largely been the case since the crisis began.
Meanwhile, Day predicted 9 million foreclosures over the next four years, which will cause 92 million neighboring families to see their own property values drop by an additional $1.9 trillion.
In 2009 alone, she said, 2.4 million families will lose their homes, leading to a $502 billion additional drop in value for 70 million neighboring homes.
“This is why we think that eventually they will have to come back and resurrect the bankruptcy fix,” she said. “It is the only thing that makes sense.”
Mouton eventually found help from the Dallas Urban League, one of the oldest civil rights groups that helps economically empower African Americans.
It took a housing counselor at the organization five months to track down Mouton’s lender and convince a resistant servicer to modify his loan. With lots of patience and persistence, the company finally agreed to modify the terms of his loan, one week before his house was to be sold.
The total price of the home grew to $102,000 — about $20,000 above its current appraisal, Mouton estimated. But the Dallas Urban League also got the company to drop Mouton’s interest rate to 2 percent and cut his mortgage payments in half, to $628 a month.
Terms, Mouton says, he can live with.
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