From Salon:
When I got the angriest, while reading the book, was when you were talking about the foreclosure courts in Tampa. We encounter a lawyer who’s advocating for people who were in danger of losing their homes. He discovered that the banks’ cases fell apart if he put up the least resistance. At that point, reading it, I assumed the court would dismiss the banks’ cases against these people, let them stay in their homes. Instead the default assumption was on behalf of the banks. It was infuriating.
There is something almost Dickensian about those foreclosure courts. You just want to come up with some elaborate metaphor out of ” Bleak House” to describe the remorseless, inhuman, machine-like quality they have, just grinding through case after case after case, totally disconnected from what we think of as justice, and certainly from what seems best for the human beings involved. Thirty cases in an hour. As one woman said to me, your house is gone in less time then you spend at the McDonald’s drive-up window.
I had thought of the courts as one institution that was still functioning reasonably well, but these state foreclosure courts were a picture of chaos. Documents are missing. There are phony signatures. No one is even asking the basic question: Can’t we find a way to keep people in their houses?
It’s just not good for anyone for millions of people to lose their homes. It’s not good for the bank. It’s not good for society. It’s certainly not good for the homeowners. But we just did not have the wherewithal as a country to come together with a solution. Tampa is kind of the heart of the matter. It’s where the problems are at their most palpable.
