Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

Full language of the promised Democratic foreclosure reform bill is set to be rolled out this week in the Ohio House Committee on Housing and Urban Revitalization, chaired by Cleveland Representative Mike Foley, one of the two main sponsors.

The proposal will be House Bill 3, reflecting its priority for House Dems.  In addition to the principal sponsors — Foley and Rep. Denise Driehaus of Cincinnati — the placeholder version of HB 3 has 24 listed co-sponsors.

Sponsor testimony is scheduled to be presented at the H&UR Committee’s meeting Wednesday.

Last week the committee got a taste of the arguments pro and con in the form of invited testimony from Paul Bellamy, the new Director of Cuyahoga County’s Foreclosure Prevention Program, and Michael Adelman of the Ohio Bankers’ League. (The links are to pdf copies of their respective testimonies.)

By all accounts this debate is going to get very hot, very fast.  The Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association, headed by C. William Cosgrove of Union National Mortgage of Strongsville — a very small fish in the industry’s mammoth lobbying sewer — is already on the attack.  But the foreclosure moratorium included in the bill has already been supported by several boards of county commissioners. And the Dayton Daily News published an editorial Friday that was as close to an outright endorsement of HB 3 as can be expected at this point:

Some people want to think the foreclosure epidemic is over, that we have hit bottom.

They are wrong. Workers are still losing their jobs. Predatory loans are still dragging down many families, and low “teaser” interest rates are still expiring, resulting sometimes in 30 percent increases in homeowners’ monthly payments.

And does it need to be said: Homes are still not selling. Prices are still falling.

These forces and more are driving Ohio’s lawmakers to try to staunch the financial bleeding. Critics who object to what Rep. Foley is proposing can complain only if they have better ideas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 12:57 am 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.