New Orleans Fresh off our meeting and work in Detroit, the Home Savers Campaign got a break. In response to Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings complaints about Vision Property Management, the national rent-to-own operation’s lack of cooperation with him and his committee, symbolized by the lead poisoning of children living in one of their contracted properties, FNMA banned VPM from participating in further purchases of foreclosed properties in REO auctions. Vision of course cried foul, but there was finally a crack in the wall that Vision and hundreds of other companies have built through impunity and predatory practices.
What was less clear about FNMA’s response was whether they were just trying to get the Congressman off of their backs or whether this is a real change of heart. Although in their announcement they indicated to the New York Times that they had investigated the various claims, the nature of their investigations and the standards they used to bar VPM were not disclosed. It was also unclear that they were looking past VPM to the other companies that are bleeding lower income and working families in the same way. Furthermore, while Fannie Mae has stepped up, Freddie Mac is still cowering in silence even though they were also asked by the Congressman to ban Vision.
The Home Savers Campaign is drafting a letter to demand that FNMA bar any company from their auctions that relies on “as is” contracts for contract land sales or rent-to-own agreements. In Pittsburgh, Akron, Youngstown, Detroit, Memphis, Philadelphia, and other cities, we have found that this “as is” language is a license by not only Vision, but all of the companies in this sector to push properties into the hands of families desperate for affordable housing on any terms. Many times the companies are relying on the gray area of whether they are contracting with families who can claim to be tenants and access some rights available to them as tenants, depending on the city or state, or whether the families are now putative “owners-to-be” and allowing them to escape the strictures of local and state regulations.
The Toledo, Ohio ordinance makes it clear that such families in any manner of contract land purchases have to have a warrant of habitability before any contract can be validly signed and the family allowed to move in. The devil is in the details though when it comes to enforcement. Lawyers and tenant advocates told the campaign in Detroit that there is also a similar warrant of habitability required in that city, but there is no enforcement so it’s a dead letter.
The Home Savers Campaign intends to demand that any company operating with “as is” language in their agreements should be barred from accessing any property through auctions or sales foreclosed or delinquent homes in order to dam the flow of properties upstream to these predators. Enforcement or no, that will ensure in the future that companies have to ensure at least that minimum standards have been met in these homes, before desperate families are allowed to live in them. Additionally, any work done by the families before they receive the deeds should be reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses directly or be discounted in the sales price.
Families desperate for housing cannot be the ATM for predatory housing schemes and the companies, big or small, that are running these scams.