A disaster is unfolding all around us. Millions of homeowners throughout the United States are struggling to make payments on expensive mortgages and avoid foreclosures. At stake: their homes, their savings and their peace of mind.
The current crisis is the product of a decade of excesses and abuses in the mortgage market, where aggressive sales by lenders and brokers helped push home buying and refinancing to unprecedented heights.
The main beneficiaries of this frenzy of buying and lending were the deal makers on Wall Street and mortgage brokers on Main Street who got rich along the way. And now, as pundits explain the need for a “correction” in an overheated market, homeowners – including many who paid high prices for so-called subprime loans – can expect to feel much of the resulting pain.
Already, as this is written in April 2008, a wave of foreclosures has depressed house prices throughout the country. Forced to acknowledge billions of dollars in losses from foolish loans, lenders and investors now balk at extending credit to hard-pressed consumers. Meanwhile, job losses and other indicators signal that America’s economy may have already plunged into a recession.
We invite you to spend a few minutes at this website, where you will hear some voices too rarely heard in discussions of the crisis: those of consumers victimized by aggressive and unscrupulous mortgage lenders. Here, four Boston homeowners tell of the wrongs that were inflicted upon them and share some thoughts about the nature of the crisis and possible solutions.
The interviews and materials of this web site were produced and presented with the support of a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Text and research by Rick Jurgens, National Consumer Law Center. Editorial review by Elizabeth Renuart of NCLC and Jim Campen of Americans for Fairness in Lending.
Videotape recording and production and research by Paul Niwa, Professor of Journalism, Emerson College.
Production assistance by Nayna Sasidharan, Kathryn Fitzgerald and Xiang Liu of Emerson College.
Special thanks to Robert Pulster and Virginia Pratt of ESAC (Ensuring Stability through Action in our Community) in Jamaica Plain, Mass.
and NCLC