One of the greatest frustrations about this whole disaster that is fraudclosure gate is the refusal of the banks to negotiate in good faith with borrowers, their failure to provide loan modifications (that they have been paid to consider via federal dollars) and the abuse they heap onto borrowers that are trapped in the hell of foreclosure and modification.
The banks have free reign to abuse homeowners, lose paperwork (again and again and again) and laugh all the way to the bank (short trip because they already are the bank). The efforts of the banks are paying off….for them at least….massive profits for the banks and Wall Street (not so much for real people on Main Street, but they don’t matter in this country anymore). It’s a sad and disgusting state of affairs made all the more disgusting by the fact that all this reprehensible behavior is financed by the taxpayer’s own money. The only bright spot….the only hope is the fact that journalists are performing their sacred function of shining the light on abuses…because the title of this post is misleading….you cannot shame the banks…..
And now from the New York Times:
The case involved Lilla Roberts, the 73-year-old retired physical therapist I wrote about last month, whose home in Jamaica, N.Y., had been foreclosed on last summer by Bank of America without her knowledge and turned over to Fannie Mae, which was in the process of trying to evict her. With the help of a young public interest lawyer, Elizabeth Lynch, Ms. Roberts filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping the eviction and reversing the foreclosure, something Ms. Lynch conceded was a long shot.
Ms. Roberts’s story “” buttressed with ample documentation provided by Ms. Lynch “” was both awful and emblematic of the whole foreclosure mess. Having fallen behind on her mortgage when her upstairs tenant stopped paying his rent, Ms. Roberts spent the next three years banging her head against a wall trying to get a mortgage modification.