Everything Has Changed

It's what our leaders have reminded us, and because a couple of yabbos in Boston blew up some toaster-ovens at a sporting event, we need to sacrifice what's left of our civil liberties because freedom.

On the other hand, your freedom not to have your neighborhood turned into a homeless squatters' encampment, well, not so much:

Housing experts speculate that banks are purposely refusing to take title of abandoned foreclosures as a strategic move to better manage their ballooning portfolios of real-estate owned or REO properties. If more properties were put on the market, it might dampen the nascent housing recovery, the thinking goes.

“I have long been convinced that the current run up in home prices is a false high,” says Ruhi Maker, a senior staff attorney at the nonprofit Empire Justice Center in Rochester, N.Y. “Once all these foreclosures are through the system we could see another decline in prices.”

James Kowalski, executive director of Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, says he has clients who have tried for years to get their servicers to foreclose and take title to their homes.

“There are literally thousands of borrowers who have been trying to hand the house back to the bank and they won’t take it back,” Kowalski says. “They can decide not to file, to rescind a notice of default, or to ask for continuances, and they’re doing it repeatedly in Florida. If you want any better proof that the banks are slowing down the process state-by-state, based on their own internal analysis, this is it. The banks control the pacing of the foreclosure process, not the homeowners, not the judges.”

There is a fairly straightforward solution for this, and there always has been. Unfortunately for us, our leaders just don't seem to see things that way. Would be nice if they did, however!

(Via.)

---Baron V