Chicago Foreclosures are terrible experiences for families and neighborhoods. More than 5 million homes were lost to foreclosures in the 2007-2008 housing crisis. Even today as home prices have largely moved back up to 2006 prices nationally, there are still more than 1 million foreclosures annually. As we all know, despite the numbers touted by big banks and government, the number of mortgage modifications was minuscule compared to the desperation and need of families, despite billions of federal dollars, because the banks drove the process, stuttering and stalling all the way while leaving millions under water, where many are still swimming.
After the pickup trucks, borrowed station wagons, and occasional moving vans pulled a family out of their home, sometimes with a sheriff pushing and real estate agent pulling them at the door, many of these homes ended up unsold and piled up in a heap at Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, the quasi-public-private guarantor of the mortgage. Finally, in the early evening, our team in Chicago, trying to get our arms around a campaign to stop the predatory practices of contract-for-deed sales, got a list of 153,000 names and addresses of foreclosed properties that FNMA had dumped onto the market when they couldn’t be sold. These were just the properties in three states with about 50,000 in Illinois, 60,000 in Michigan, and 43000 or so in Ohio.
Going through the list, name by name, was a little like walking through a graveyard and trying to read the tombstones. These are the properties FNMA couldn’t sell and ended up packaging in twos and threes to individuals, tens to real estate brokers and construction companies, and hundreds to investors, and thousands to equity hedge fund operators like Harbour out of Dallas. Looking at the list, Harbour had picked 2500 roughly of its reported 6700 in just these three states. The Detroit Land Trust ended up with a pile, as did the Wayne County Treasury Department, and a number of other city and county receptacles of last resort when even these tranche investors of foreclosed properties couldn’t off load them.
A column in the list was even more depressing in some ways because it indicated where the FNMA dump still stands smoldering like the trash fires of La Matanza outside of Buenos Aires. The columns noted whether or not the properties were owner occupied or not. Yes, meant, yes. Zero mean no. Any random grouping of 30 or so entries would find as few as 8 and as many as 10 or one-third occupied.
We are still trying to pull the information out of the data to determine where predation in the form of contract-for-deed purchases are being used to continue the pattern of destruction and exploitation. What is clear to me so far though, as my fingers walk through the columns in the foreclosures dumped by FNMA, is that this kind of FNMA garbage heap destroyed thousands of families and thousands of neighborhood, lowering values and leaving abandonment and vacant, now deteriorating homes.
No matter what campaign we outline by the end of these days of meetings, there is no escaping the human and community tragedy all around us.