Looking Under the Hood at the Tragic FNMA Foreclosure Dump

Citizen Wealth Financial Justice Foreclosure Organizing

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 …

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Predatory Contract-for-Deed Sales Cast a Long Shadow in Chicago

Citizen Wealth Financial Justice Foreclosure Organizing

Chicago  Sometimes it felt like fifty years ago. That’s only partially because sometimes the conversation would toggle back and forth to the work the Contract Buyers’ League did on Chicago’s West and South Sides decades ago from 1967 to 1972 or so, as strategies and tactics that would address the current, horrid, predatory comeback of …

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Realtors and Redlining Destroyed Neighborhoods – Was Alinsky a No-Show?

Citizen Wealth Financial Justice

New Orleans   Looking into the rising return of the family crushing and neighborhood killing predation involved in contract-for-deed property transactions being revived by Wall Street veterans and facilitated by weak regulations and federal off-loading of foreclosure inventory from the real estate bubble of 2008, I stumbled onto an interesting book, Family Properties:  Race, Real Estate and …

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