From the NY Times:
To walk 145th Street in South Jamaica, past red-brick homes with metal awnings and chain-link fences, is to find a storm of immense destructive power still raging.
Three years ago, when I wandered this block south of Linden Boulevard in Queens, banks had foreclosed on eight homes. In the years since, banks have filed notice against a half-dozen more owners. Some of those homes sit abandoned, plywood boards nailed across doors and windows, as if to guard against further spread of this plague.
We are accustomed to hearing politicians talk of a halting recovery from the recession. They detect heartbeats in the job market and flickers of life in house sales. New York and New Jersey, our governors proclaim, are on the comeback trail.
Not here.
A dozen miles from Midtown Manhattan, the foreclosure belt stretches across the heart of black homeownership in this city, from Canarsie and East New York in Brooklyn, to Springfield Gardens and St. Albans, Queens, where Fats Waller, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald once owned handsome Tudor-style homes.
Black Americans came late to homeownership for reasons deeply rooted in our tragic racial history. Black New Yorkers making more than $68,000 are nearly five times as likely to hold high-interest mortgages as whites of similar income, and their default rates are much higher. Now a generation watches as its housing wealth is vaporized.
19 comments:
Isn't this "people of color" land?
First these folks get lured by predatory lenders to take on debt they can't afford.
Then they get foreclosed upon.
Now it looks like there's a lot of "underutilized" property just waiting to be over-developed...huh?
This looks like social engineering at play...even in our democracy!
I think the banks were to blame to dole out mortgages without getting income verification. There is no reason banks cannot grant instant loan modifications to lower interest rates in order for a home owner to keep their home. SOme homeowner don't deserve to hold on & should lose their houses - yet others need more than a modification but not that significantly more and the Feds can help with that too. Banks should be given a mandate to sell once a home is received - they should be given to RE Companies to sell at substantially lower prices to get them off the plight to blight!
Forget about the confusing lending terms, the comlpex contracts, the shady lenders...
In the first place, why did these people think buying a house in a ghetto was a good idea???
One man's predatory lending is another man's stupid investment.
most of the U.S. banks did not take the t.a.r.p. money forced on them by the Obama Adm.
ie. ...the Queens County/N/Y/Community bank never gave a freeloader a mortgage if they were NINJNA.
And they returned $500,000,000 to Obama ,that they did not want initially......
No one had anything forced on them, Gramps. They took it and were very happy about it.
Listen Sonny,
they took it all because they couldn't get anything else!
And who beefed up your down payment for your house or condo...
mommy and daddy?
Anon No. 7:
I did, Pops, with my salary.
don't cry for me! some how it's really hard for me to get up any sympathy for these people who lied to get mortgages that they knew that they could not afford.
well, as soon as the homeless organized they got the Dept of Homeless Services which does nothing but exploit homeless people instead of assisting them. Let's get a Dept of Foreclosures NYC agency to write press releases and hold bogus press conferences.
and why are we supposed to cry only for black or hispanic mortgage holders? what about white mortgage holders? who's going to cry for them?
ACORN..".AFFORDABLE HOUSING CENTERS OF AMERICA", defunded by the U.S.Congress in 2010 is now operating under a NEW name," BOTTOM LINE".
also in Cal...(.A.C.C.E.)" ALIANCE OF CALIFORNIANS FOR COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT"is ACORN reconstituted.
see:Judicial Watch .com....."Rebranding of Acorn".
B.Obama ,prior to politics was a officer of ACORN,CHICAGO.
You keep forgetting that ACORN is out of business, Gramps. And "Judicial Watch" isn't exactly an unbiased observer.
And if ACORN, when they were around, was 10% as dangerous as the guys at Fox "News" and "Judicial Watch" made them out to be, they would have been really bad guys. A lot of you guys were played for suckers by people who needed villains to prop up.
You're all forgetting the real culprit:
Andrew Cuomo
one wonders if "IRRELEVANT LEFTIE" will believe a article in the VOICE,by WAYNE BARRETT, 2008, concerning the cause of the subprime loan meltdown?
maybe it is not left wing enough.
some of the names are now part of the Soros funded left wing"COMMUNITY GROUPS".
is there a recent update of this U.S.ripoff by crooked politicians, GEORGE THE ATHEIST ?
I thought you didn't read left-wing publications, Gramps.
And George Soros is someone else that the guys at Fox "News" and "Judicial Watch" have propped up as villains for someone like you to get paranoid about. The only difference between Soros and the Koch Brothers is that he's on our side.
why don't you read George the A's link to "ANDREW CUOMO"?
does it burst your bubble ?
No, since there wasn't a bubble to begin with as far as the Governor was concerned.
In Springfield Gardens there is a garden apartment complex that the prior owners sold as two family houses to straw buyers and is now in foreclosure. Thomas Kontogiannis and Group Kappa corp also owners of One Cross Island Plaza have been convicted of mortgage/bank fraud 98 million dollars. There are 28 buildings,56 units. That's 28 buildings added to the foreclosure list. Kontogiannis is wealthy and ownes many businesses,no one tricked him.
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