“I put my whole life into this house. After I do all this work, they want to take it from me," said Christopher Hall.
Since the administration’s program was begun in March, it has been plagued by complaints of bureaucratic confusion and the indifference of mortgage companies. Many homeowners who have applied for loan modifications complain that their documents have been lost repeatedly or that they have been rejected without explanation.
Right to Mediation
The Philadelphia program forces an outcome by bringing together all the principals in one room. If the mortgage company proves intractable, the homeowner has the right to request mediation in front of a volunteer lawyer serving as a provisional judge, who relays recommendations to the program’s supervising judge. If the judge finds that the mortgage company is not acting in good faith, she can hold the house in limbo by denying permission for a sheriff’s sale.
While data is scant, a legal aid group, Philadelphia Volunteers for the Indigent Program, has complete information on 61 of the 309 cases it has resolved since October 2008 through the anti-foreclosure program. Only five resulted in sheriff’s sales, while 35 ended with loan modifications that lowered payments, the group says. The remaining 21 cases were divided among bankruptcies, loan forbearance and repayment arrangements, graceful exits and straightforward sales.
Some suggest the city’s program is plagued by the same basic defect as the Obama rescue plan: Nearly all the loans that have been modified have been altered on a trial basis, requiring homeowners to reapply for an extension of the terms after only a few months — a process that appears rife with obstacles, according to participants.
“There’s no teeth to the conciliation program,” said Matthew B. Weisberg, a Philadelphia lawyer who represents homeowners in cases involving alleged mortgage fraud. “It’s a largely ineffective stopgap prolonging what appears to be the inevitable, which is the loss of homes.”
Still, Mr. Weisberg grudgingly praised the plan.
“It’s arbitrary and unpredictable,” he said, “but it’s better than what anybody else is doing.”
Sheriff Delays Auction
Philadelphia’s Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Pilot Program began with a resolution passed by the City Council in March 2008, calling on Sheriff John D. Green to scrap the sheriff’s sale scheduled for April. Low-income neighborhoods were already experiencing a surge of foreclosures involving subprime loans given to people with tainted credit. With unemployment growing, lost paychecks were now pushing people into delinquency, reaching into middle-class and even wealthy neighborhoods. In early 2008, nearly 200 homes a month were being auctioned by the sheriff’s office, about one-third more than in 2006.
In West Philadelphia, Councilman Curtis Jones Jr., one of the sponsors of the resolution, watched his childhood neighborhood consumed by foreclosure, as the homes of working families — their porches once lined with flower pots — were boarded up with plywood.
“It becomes a blight on your entire community,” Mr. Jones said. “It creates an environment that fosters everything bad, from prostitution to drug dealing to wildlife, like raccoons taking over whole houses. One house becomes 10, and 10 becomes the whole block.”
In response to the resolution, Sheriff Green canceled the April sale. Meanwhile, Judge Annette M. Rizzo, who oversaw a local task force on stemming foreclosures, joined with the president judge of Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas to develop the program.
For Judge Rizzo, a high-energy woman who has long taken an interest in housing policy, the moratorium presented both a crisis and an opportunity. The sheriff was effectively refusing to fulfill his mandated responsibilities, leaving his office vulnerable to legal challenge. But if the mortgage companies could be persuaded to participate in an alternative way of addressing foreclosures, more people could stay in their homes. ( nytimes.com )
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