Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

Rescheduled.

The Foreclosure Action Coalition wants the Court’s 33 34 judges to:

1) Order a Stay (freeze) of at least three months on all foreclosure cases involving owner-occupied property. (Foreclosures on vacant property would proceed normally.)

2) Determine which properties are owner-occupied vs. renter occupied. Work with Cleveland Tenants Organization to conduct outreach to all affected tenants before allowing foreclosures on rental properties to proceed.

3) Divert all owner-occupied foreclosures to community counseling programs affiliated with the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program, with the Court’s own Mediation Program as a second step to be used where appropriate.

Here’s the Coalition’s complete fact sheet about the event.

Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) is planning 90-day foreclosure stay to get more cases into a conciliation program before going to trial.  The Allegheny County plan imitates Philadelphia’s successful approach. Neither of these cities has anything like Cuyahoga County’s foreclosure disaster on their hands.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:

Congress just gave the Secretary of the Treasury  $700 billion to (among other things) try to acquire control of defaulted mortgages and restructure them, or persuade their private servicers to do the same.  One Presidential candidate says if he wins he’ll spend $300 billion of the money to buy up failing mortgages directly and swap them for more affordable models. The other says he’ll require banks getting bailout money to stop their foreclosures for 90 days.

But Cuyahoga County’s Common Pleas Court — responsible for one of the most foreclosure-devastated communities in the U.S., with new cases still being filed at a rate of 1,100 to 1,200 a month — continues to push most of them down the same old path to trial, summary judgment and sheriff’s sale.

After the events of the last three five weeks, you can only ask: Are they nuts?

Thanks to the bank bailout, thousands of Cuyahoga County mortgages now in foreclosure, or about to be, could soon be owned or controlled by the Federal government and eligible for major renegotiation.  But nobody knows which ones they might be.

Do we want to find out when it’s already too late, because the sheriff’s sales have already taken place, the families are long gone, and their former homes are now just a couple of thousand more stripped-out vacant eyesores?

It’s really, really time for our judges to pull themselves together and put a stop to this wanton, irrational, totally counterproductive trashing of our neighborhoods and our neighbors’ lives by the same geniuses who trashed their own companies and the international economy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Foreclosure crisis, Poor Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.