Hard To Focus When So Much Is Going On
I have tried to stay focused on the Cool Community Forum at the Louis Stokes Auditorium scheduled for noon on Thursday. It is now less than two days away, but Bill Callahan has been focusing on the foreclosure problem over on his blog. As I read his entry for July 8th, I remembered that Ray Pianka had given me a copy of his testimony that he gave in Washington DC at the Committeee on Oversight and Government Reform Domestic Policy subcommittee hearing that Congressman Dennis Kucinich held the night he sat down with Meet.The.Bloggers. I believe the addenda he attached to that testimony dovetails nicely with Bill’s expose.
The first addendum is Cleveland Housing Court Bank/Lender Warrant Capias List. Both banks-Deutsche(twice) and Wells Fargo (once) show on this list . The significance of this list pretains to Judge Pianka’s “Clean Hands’ doctrine. If a bank/lender is on the Warrant Capias list which means that there is a court case pending for code violations the Judge will not issue evictions until the lender or a representative shows in court to address the charges against the bank/lender.
Then there was the list that shows the City of Cleveland Special Assessment Certification List-Vacant Lot Maintenance Liens (Corporations List). Deutsche Bank appears fourteen times for a total owed of $5094.82. Wells Fargo appears ten times for a total of 3320.32. The alarming thing about this list was the number of community development corporations listed on this addendum for assessments. Remember this list pertains to vacant lot maintenance. For instance, Cleveland Housing Network shows up 82 times! The State of Ohio shows up 16 times and HUD shows up 20 times. The Cleve land Board of Education shows up. The Clinic Foundation shows up there as does First Energy.
And then the final list deals with the board up charges for vacant and abandoned housing. Deutsche bank appears 22 times for a total of $12,244 and Wells Fargo appears 13 times for $6172. These were the figures through May 9th, 2007. So I am sure that Bill can use his statistical knowledge to calculate how many more of the foreclosures that Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank continue to file will add to the $$$ owed to Cleveland.
In a more recent post, Bill cites the 356 additional foreclosures in Cleveland on July 9th, but an additional 250 suburban homes were on that list as well bringing the grand total of the properties offered for sale on Monday to 606. No one is bidding on these properties, not even the banks. The numbers are dismal. The number of withdrawals due to bankruptcy is rising as well.
This is everybody’s problem and it does not bode well for America. We are at the epicenter of this hurricane, but the rest of the country is reeling as well. Economists will say it is the ebb and flow of supply and demand and that we need to leave the market correct itself, but why aren’t we talking about what this is doing to our country globally? The United States has always been known as a “safe harbor” for foreign investors with real estate being one of the more stable investments. Not any more. With the advent of derivatives and hedge funds brought to us by our own government with those two geniuses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we are squandering our major export “TEA” worldwide–the kind of “tea” you get from our accountability, our integrity, our security. And Congress’s answer to this has been to hand the fixin’ over to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When Warren Buffett tells you that he can’t understand derivatives, maybe they are not to be understood and not used.