By: Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
Just recently, the U.S. House of Representatives seemed to be riding to the rescue of U.S. homeowners with its Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2007, which passed by a commanding margin.
Back in March, the National Urban League addressed the unfolding subprime lending debacle through our Homebuyer's Bill of Rights well before the issue started to trigger shockwaves in international credit markets and to send hedge fund analysts to the unemployment line. At that time, policy makers and government officials were reluctant to support greater regulation to give the market a chance to correct itself. Guess what? It didn't happen.
But the chamber didn't quite send struggling homeowners their knight in shining armor. But some kind of help is better than nothing at all, I guess. Such is life on Capitol Hill, where slim party margins, especially in the U.S. Senate, make for glacial progress in the legislative process.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of households who have and will be foreclosed upon? According to Realty Trac, foreclosure filings in the third quarter were up 100 percent in 2007 over 2006, and up 33 percent over the second quarter. By the end of September, nearly half a million properties had entered some stage of foreclosure nationwide
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