Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

The City of Cleveland’s proposal for a $15 million Federal stimulus grant to build a public wireless broadband network is officially out of the running, at least for now.

On Friday the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration added status information to the individual application pages at Broadband USA.  The City of Cleveland’s page now says:  “Status Application Not Funded”.

Apparently the City’s project was one of about 1,400 that drew “Thank, but no thanks” letters last week from the NTIA last week. About 400 (or maybe fewer) are still under consideration for funding from the agency’s first-round pool of $1.4 billion.

The City can try again. NTIA has announced a second funding round, which will award up to $2.4 billion broadband stimulus dollars by September 30.  The proposal deadline for Round 2  is March 15.

That’s the way the Plain Dealer sees it, anyway. (Article.)

So… I wonder if they’ll stop rationing the toilet paper now.

(That’s not a joke.  Ask someone who works there.)

Click on the graphic for a Google map of local properties owned (as of yesterday) by Marc Tow and Michael Alexander’s companies, EZ Access Funding and Diamond Housing Group.

(Map created using County Auditor’s data and GPS Visualizer.)

In response to yesterday’s post about the California “predatory investor” whose company, EZ Access Funding, owns the vacant house on West 83rd that exploded and burned Monday, I got the following email last night:

Dear Mr. Callahan,

We have seen your blog online. Since we found out about the explosion on our property in Cleveland we have been in crisis mode. We have found out that a young man named Travis had been stealing everything out of the home. We did have the property inspected last week prior to the explosion and it was left secured. The neighbor did tell our inspector that the property was vandalised several times and he was keeping an eye on it for us.

Another fact is we NEVER authorized the gas to be turned on on this property and are still investigating who did turn the gas on. Please know that someone other than us has made statements about us without speaking to us directly. We are renovating one home at a time so as not to leave the proeperties vacant.

I am offering you an airline ticket to come out and meet me in person to discuss the matter.

Marc R. Tow
Marc R. Tow & Associates
3920 Birch Street, Suite 102
Newport Beach, CA 92660
Telephone: 949-975-0544
Fax: 949-975-0547
marctow2000@yahoo.com
www.towlaw.com

While I appreciate Mr. Tow’s response, I’m obviously the wrong person to be inviting out to Newport Beach to talk things over. If I were in “crisis mode” about a property of mine that blew up half the neighborhood and displaced dozens if not hundreds of neighbors, I’d be talking to the Cleveland police. And the fire department. And the Councilman, who’s raising money to help some newly homeless people who need the price of a plane ticket a lot more than me. Or I’d be using that ticket to come to Cleveland myself to see what I could do to help.

Maybe Mr. Tow is already doing all these things. I hope so. Just in case he isn’t, I’ve forwarded Mr. Tow’s email to Councilman Matt Zone and the staff at Detroit-Shoreway Development.

More later.

Update: lmiller at RealNEO points out that Marc Tow is the subject of an active capias warrant from Cleveland Housing Court, dating from a failure to appear for a hearing on one of EZ Access’s East Side properties in June… next court date set for February 4.

It turns out that the gas explosion that levelled 2022 West 83rd St. this afternoon, ripping through the surrounding neighborhood and leaving dozens homeless, is part of a whole other story.

Waaaay down at the bottom of the Plain Dealer’s online  article about the tragedy we find this:

James and Irene Garman sold the home in December 2008 for $13,500 to EZ Access Funding LLC,  according to Cuyahoga County Auditor records.

That’s EZ Access Funding LLC of Newport Beach, California.  3920 Birch Street, Suite 105, Newport Beach 92660, to be precise.  The same address as the Marc R. Tow Law Offices. And the Preferred Equity Group, LLC.  And Preferred Default Management, Inc.  And Orpheus Capital, LLC.  And the Diamond Housing Group, LLC.   And (get ready for this) the USA Wealth Institute, LLC.

All of these organizations have at least two things in common, according to the California Secretary of State:  They’re all located in Suite 102, 104 or 105 of 3920 Birch Street, and they all have Marc R. Tow listed as their agent.

Elsewhere, we find that Mr. Tow is a cofounder of the USA Wealth Institute with a gentleman named Michael Alexander… not to mention the president of Preferred Default Management and manager of Orpheus.  And here we find a CNN video clip of Mr. Alexander, identified as the president of EZ Access, discussing how and why that company has bought up 250 foreclosed houses in Detroit.   I ran across that link via the Preferred Equity Group website,  which seems to be peddling a few of those Detroit houses and also features this helpful “executive summary” of the business relationships among the USA Wealth Institute, Preferred Equity and Diamond Housing — all for the benefit of potential investors in Diamond, whose money is to be managed by Preferred Equity (Mr. Tow) to buy foreclosed houses identified by USA Wealth (Mr. Alexander).

Apparently not all of Mr. Tow and Mr. Alexander’s previous investors have found their investments satisfying. This guy isn’t too happy either. (In fact, just google “marc tow scam” and see what pops up.)

But, well, you get the idea.

Luckily, Tow and Alexander don’t own 250 properties here — just 88 in Cleveland and another 4 in East Cleveland and Garfield Heights.

Unluckily, one of them is (was) 2022 West 83rd Street.

I wonder whether anyone has called Marc Tow at his law office (949-975-0544) or the EZ Access office (949-419-9093) or the Preferred Equity office (949-379-2758) to find out what he intends to do about it.

Update 2/1: WCPN talks to an EZ Access investor and to Housing Court Judge Pianka.

It seems Cuyahoga County had about six hundred more mortgage foreclosures last year than I reported in this post two weeks ago.

Mike Schramm, NEO CANDO’s housing statistics guru, sent around an email alert on Friday about corrections to the CWRU site’s 2009 foreclosure filing statistics. Apparently their database had a significant undercount of new cases filed last January.

With that problem corrected, NEO CANDO is now showing:

• 11,408 mortgage foreclosure cases were filed in Common Pleas Court during 2009 — a decrease of about 1,150 (9%) compared to 2008.
• All of the decrease occurred in the city of Cleveland, which saw 4,465 mortgage foreclosures in the past year compared to 5,577 in 2008.
• The corrected data for the rest of Cuyahoga County (all communities outside of Cleveland) shows virtually no slowdown in filings… with 6,943 in 2009 compared to 6,974 in 2008.

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From data at  NEO CANDO (available only through December 22, so far):

Notice that these eight biggest filers accounted for 65% of the county’s 2009 foreclosures.

Meanwhile:

• BofA says bonuses will rise, but no record payouts
• Wells Fargo Pays $25 Million in Stock Bonuses
• Bank Bonuses, Bigger Than Ever, in the Spotlight

Our friends at NEO CANDO don’t have figures for the last week of December yet, but it’s now possible to combine information from the Common Pleas Court docket with NEO CANDO’s totals through December 22 and conclude that…

• Just under 10,800 new mortgage foreclosures were filed in Cuyahoga County in 2009… the lowest total in four years, but still a very big number, especially considering that it brings the county’s running total for those same four years to more than 47,000.  That’s about 11% of all residential properties in the county.
• About 4,200 of those 2009 foreclosures were filed against properties in the city of Cleveland… a significant drop  from about 5,600 in 2008 and 6,440 in 2007.  Yes, it appears that Cleveland neighborhoods may be starting to run out of foreclosure fuel.  How could they not, when one-sixth of the city’s homes have been targets of foreclosure just since January 2006?  But…
• With nearly 6,600 foreclosures in the rest of the county, 2009 was a worse year for suburban foreclosures than either 2006 or 2007, and just barely better than 2008.

Here are the numbers of new foreclosure filings by month over the past two years.  Is this a downward trend?  You be the judge:

Evidently the New County Politics is going to to require the same old iron stomach.

As opponents of Issue 6 before the election, Democrats FitzGerald, Rokakis and Jones have no business running for executive, said Parma Heights Mayor Martin Zanotti, who was a leading advocate of the reform measure.

“It would be the ultimate hypocrisy to have trashed Issue 6 with the many false claims against it and then turn around and say, ‘I want to lead that government,’ ” said Zanotti…

116,000 people voted against Issue 6. Think Zanotti will let us vote next November?

Maybe we’ll be replaced with some better qualified voters from Geauga County.

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Somehow this has escaped the Plain Dealer’s notice, but the immediate impact of our new County Charter will be an annual payroll increase of something like $700,000 for the new array of elected and appointed officials.

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