Look back at how long I’ve been screaming about “Capacity“. CAPACITY, CAPACITY, CAPACITY. No one has any idea who many of the entities are that brought suits to foreclose over the last several years, especially when they were plaintiffs of the alphabet soup variation, “the XSIS 2206- Alt Trust”. What is that? Where is that? Who is that? Those are all questions judges should have been asking for years…especially before they granted that alphabet soup zombie trust the right to throw their neighbor out into the street. Instead, the oft repeated judicial phrase was, “You haven’t paid your mortgage so I’m granting Summary Judgment.” Far worse in my mind than a homeowner not paying a $1,000/month mortgage is a judge granting a $200,000 judgment to a zombie alphabet soup plaintiff. Who owns those homes that you granted foreclosure to now your honor? Who was that judgment assigned to after the fact? Who or what took title to that property? Why did no one care to think about all of this?
We screamed CAPACITY! We screamed STANDING! We screamed FRAUD!
Like Alice in Wonderland or the Twilight Zone, some judges claimed they couldn’t see anything. Now it turns out that in many cases not only did they not have CAPACITY, not only did they not have STANDING, not only were the committing FRAUD. They also had NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH.
The minions of this profound evil will turn this around on the judges that I hold such profound respect for. They will shrug their shoulders and say, “We were just the proponents of our client’s case, it was the judge’s job to review the files and make sure we were not committing fraud.” What about that retired couple that got thrown out into the street two years ago but their home still stands vacant? What about that latino couple with a poor grasp of the language and our legal system, the husband defeated and destroyed because he could not keep the home he had bought for his family? The single mom that did her best but just couldn’t keep her head above water?
All of them defeated by zombie trusts and a legal system too concerned with doing the bidding of the banks and institutions that were bailed out with our money. The question is not how bad all this is or how deep it will go. That sinking, sickening pit in all of our stomachs answers those questions. The real question is how will we work to make it right to all those people that were wronged?
We must all start with the perspective that our economy, our neighborhoods, our homeowner’s and condo associations are far better off with homeowners in those homes. We must understand there is a powerful American ethic that homeowners want to pay a mortgage, they want to be bought into the system. I’ve done hundreds of homeowner refinances and purchases. When a homeowner signs those documents, there is fear, but there is pride. Pride that I have a mortgage. A sense of purpose that now I’m going to work and pay this mortgage for this home I own. That was all tossed out the window in this brief flicker of time that was the securitization frenzy.
It’s now time to provide homeowners with a track to stay in their homes and support their communities. We put our realtors, our appraisers, our contractors, our people back to work in our communities. We collect mortgage payments from homeowners who are in these homes then we wait for the Wall Street Fat Cats to come on down and prove up their claim to the money and the mortgages that our elected circuit court judges are supervising. The process is self-funding. The infastructure and administrative capacity are already in place through the existing mediation programs that are up and running in circuits across the state. The funding is in place once our courts turn away from the unfairness of the $9.6 million rocket dockets and focus on Stability for Florida Families. The program is detailed below:
