Campaign News

A Report on the Foreclosure CrisisCalifornia in Crisis: How Wells Fargo's Foreclosure Pipeline is Damaging Local Communities

Five years after the housing market collapsed, California’s economy remains weak. The unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent, twice what it was in 2006, and in 2012 the State’s underemployment rate averaged an astonishing 19.3 percent.

The continuing housing crisis remains a key cause of this widespread economic tragedy. Nearly two million California homeowners are underwater, owing more on their mortgage than their home is worth.

Since 2008, banks have foreclosed on approximately 1.7 million homes in the state. Right now, around 65,000 California homeowners are in the “foreclosure pipeline” – they’ve received a Notice of Default or a Notice of Trustee Sale. Every day, more and more families get added to this list.

Wells Fargo is the biggest mortgage service provider in California, responsible for nearly one in five of these impending foreclosures. This report shows the tremendous damage that will befall California’s communities if Wells Fargo continues to foreclose on so many families.

Download the report here.

Executive Summary

Five years after the housing market collapsed, California’s economy remains weak. The unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent, twice what it was in 2006, and in 2012 the State’s underemployment rate averaged an astonishing 19.3 percent. Millions of Californians are struggling to make ends meet.

The continuing housing crisis remains a key cause of this widespread misery. Nearly two million California homeowners are underwater, owing more on their mortgage than their home is worth. This tremendous mortgage debt is severely crippling the State’s economy by holding back consumer spending and preventing a robust recovery.

And the mortgage debt is devastating the lives of too many Californians. Since 2008, banks have foreclosed on approximately 1.7 million homes in the state. Right now, about 65,000 California homeowners are in the “foreclosure pipeline” – they’ve received a Notice of Default or a Notice of Trustee Sale. Every day, more and more families get added to this list.

Wells Fargo is the biggest mortgage servicer in California, responsible for nearly one in five of these impending foreclosures. This report shows the tremendous damage that will befall California’s communities if Wells Fargo continues to foreclose on so many families. As of February 2013, Wells Fargo had 11,616 homes in its foreclosure pipeline. If all of these homes were to go through foreclosure:

Each home would lose approximately 22 percent of its value, for a total loss of approximately $1.07 billion, Homes in the surrounding neighborhood would lose value as well, for an additional loss of about $2.2 billion; and Government tax revenues would be cut by $20 million, as a result of that depreciation.

Every month, more homes fall into the foreclosure pipeline, compounding this disaster. The foreclosure crisis has hit African-American and Latino borrowers and communities particularly hard. The pages below highlight the concentration of distressed loans handled by Wells Fargo that are in African-American and Latino neighborhoods. These communities have already suffered tremendous wealth loss due to the recession and this report shows that far more harm will occur in the coming months unless Wells Fargo changes its policies.

But Californians do not have to accept this bleak future. Economists and policy experts across the political spectrum agree that an alternative approach to the housing crisis can be a win-win-win for homeowners, mortgage holders, and California’s economy. As this report explains, widespread modification of home mortgages to current market value would prevent tens of thousands of needless foreclosures, inject billions of dollars into the economy, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs – and would even be in the financial interest of the investors who own the mortgages.

Wells Fargo is a pivotal actor in determining whether principal reduction becomes a widespread solution. Its failure to lead on this issue is clear. The most recent report from the national monitor of the multi-state Attorneys General mortgage servicing settlement shows that in California, Wells Fargo is providing far less principal reduction than Bank of America, despite the fact that it services more loans.

The solutions are clear: Wells Fargo should (1) commit to a broad program of principal reduction, (2) be honest with Californians by reporting data on its principal reduction, short sales, and foreclosures by race, income, and zip code, and (3) immediately stop all foreclosures until the first two solutions are implemented.

After years of predatory lending and heartless foreclosures, it is time for Wells Fargo to stop. Stop the needless foreclosures. Stop the needless evictions. End this housing crisis.

The over-policing and mass criminalization of Black and brown people is the moral crisis of our time.

The United States has the world’s largest incarcerated population with approximately 2.2 million people currently behind prisons and jails (21 percent of the world’s prisoners) while several police departments across the country are under investigation for charges of police brutality, gross misconduct and civil rights violations.

Read the full article here.

Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!”

The ground this week is not East of Eden, where Cain slew Abel; it is St. Paul, Minnesota, where Philando Castile was gunned down while reaching for his ID. It is Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was shot at point-blank range, already immobilized and pinned down by police.

And while you, reader, are not Cain — after all, you did not pull the trigger — neither can any of us object, as he did, “Am I my brother’s keeper?!” We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, as Americans, as mostly-white and mostly-privileged Jews, as participants in a society where so many tragedies become travesties of racial injustice.

But what can we do? What can I do?

First, we must, communally, recognize that this is a real crisis and make it a subject of dinner conversations, rabbinic sermons and communal action. Because in fact, the problem isn’t just the cops; it’s us.

Thanks to the proliferation of recording technologies, the crisis of police violence is now more visible than ever before; Castile was killed live on Facebook. Indeed, as best as we can tell, the rates of violence haven’t risen much; we’re just seeing the evidence of it more.

Yet even in the face of gruesome videos, there is still a great deal of denial among white Americans that the deaths of Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd and now Castile and Sterling, are, in fact, a crisis of police violence against people of color. After all, none of the officers were found guilty in a court of law; they had reasons to believe they were in danger; these things happen.

But these things don’t just happen. Yes, most police officers are diligently doing their jobs and keeping us all safe. Painting with a broad brush is not only inaccurate, but leads to tragedies such as the shooting deaths of three police officers at a Dallas protest this week. At the same time, the statistics paint a convincing, terrible picture.

Over 1,000 people are killed by police every year, nearly 60% of whom were either unarmed or should never have been stopped in the first place. Compare that number to other countries. Germany had 6, Britain, 2; Japan, 0. What the hell is wrong with us, as a country?

One problem is how we police. “Quality of life” policing is a gigantic dragnet, ostensibly based on the “broken windows” theory that even petty crime leads to a deterioration of law and order in general. In practice, however, it creates confrontations where none need to exist. And then “these things happen.”

I’ll give you an example that isn’t in the news, and isn’t based on race. Just last week, an acquaintance of mine was relaxing on a beach when his towel slipped off. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath. This was a minor infraction of the law — but my friend was suddenly jumped by five police officers (two in civilian clothes), pinned to the ground and dragged, naked, off the beach while he pleaded for help.

That entire confrontation should never have taken place. At most, he should have been given a citation; really, he should have just been warned. But, presumably because that particular beach is popular with LGBTQ people and with people of color, someone, somewhere, decided that a crackdown was necessary. Thank God my friend didn’t resist arrest; he, too, could have been a statistic.

Now multiply that encounter by ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand. Even without “stop and frisk,” our nation’s approach to policing creates dangerous situations. Violence becomes inevitable.

“Broken windows” must end. “For-profit policing,” in which cops are given quotas for minor offenses in order to generate revenue and evaluate police performance, must end. Profiling must end. Escalation of minor incidents must end. The philosophy must change.

Another problem is how police are trained and reviewed. In many places, cops are not adequately trained to balance protecting safety (their own and others’) with defusing conflict. They respond, routinely, with overwhelming and often deadly force to situations that could be resolved without it. They are often scared kids, put into stressful situations with inadequate mental resources.

The rules of engagement must be changed at the training level and the legal level. States and cities should adopt international standards for the use of deadly force — both as cops are trained and as their actions are reviewed. Standards of review should be changed.

And of course, cameras should be placed on every cop in America — with strict rules that civilians’ faces be obscured before any recording is released to the public. This should help the vast majority of cops, since recordings help explain and defend appropriate conduct as much as they reveal misconduct. And in addition to holding bad cops accountable, body cameras could help prevent misconduct from happening in the first place.

Yet of the 509 fatal shootings by police that have taken place this year, body cameras were worn in only 64 of them. Who knows how many of the remaining 445 lives might have been saved, or what we would have known about the circumstances of their deaths?

Another problem is weaponization. The last two decades have witnessed a massive militarization of civilian police forces. Town sheriffs are buying tanks, military-grade weaponry — it’s outrageous and dangerous and unwarranted. Arm cops to the teeth, and they will use the tools they’re given.

And then, of course, there’s race.

Of those 509 people fatally shot by police so far this year, 202 were black or Hispanic. Young black men were killed at five times the rate of similarly-aged white men. Even taking into account higher crime rates in communities of color, this has been shown by exhaustive, detailed studies to be disproportionate. According to once such study, correcting for all these and other factors, the probability of being black, unarmed and shot by police is 3.49 times the probability of being white, unarmed and shot by police.

That’s why we need #blacklivesmatter and not #alllivesmatter: because when it comes to police violence, black lives clearly matter less.

Part of this is demographics: White men are less than one third of the U.S. population, but they are two thirds of police officers. Most of them are not overtly racist. But unconscious bias affects all of us, no matter how well-meaning we are. That’s what white privilege is: precisely that which is often invisible.

And when it comes to cops, we’re talking about life and death. This, too, must change, through recruiting, training and changes in the way our entire society talks about race.

Finally, while I doubt those Forward readers intending to vote for a candidate espousing white supremacy will ever be persuaded by evidence, it’s worth bearing in mind the yawning gap between the presidential candidates, and political parties, on this issue. Hillary Clinton has proposed creating national use-of-force guidelines, ending all forms of racial profiling, and improving training in conflict de-escalation.

Donald Trump has proposed nothing, but has said “We have to give strength and power back to the police.”

And in this regard, most other Republicans are right on board with him, usually refusing to acknowledge that a crisis is taking place or that is has anything to do with race. This, of course, reflects the racialized preferences of their white, conservative base. (The racism Trump’s candidacy has ignited didn’t come from nowhere.) It is also reprehensible.

As on so many other issues — climate change, gun regulation, the wealth gap — the Republican Party is on the wrong side of justice. If Trump is elected, more innocent black people will die. It is that simple. And those #StillBernie lefties still spreading calumnies about Clinton in the name of this or that pet issue should reflect on that.

Now, I didn’t come up with a single solution in this column. They and others are listed, and described in detail, on the websites of Campaign Zero, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing: ending “broken windows,” limiting use of force, demilitarization, body cameras, oversight, et cetera.

And yet, each time something like this happens, we white people ask ourselves “What can be done?” often throwing up our hands in despair. When in fact, a lot can be done. The problem is that around half the population doesn’t want to do it.

So, ironically, we need to make this crisis worse. Police violence against people of color requires local involvement, pushing for city- and county-level reforms. That gives Jewish communities, and other organized groups, unique leverage to make change — if we care enough to do so. Unfortunately, too many of our fellow privileged Jews aren’t “woke” to the crisis or the ways to address it. While God may hear the cries of our brothers’ blood, we are often deaf to them.

By JAY MICHEALSON 

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NPR - March 6, 2015, by  Yuki Noguchi - The cold weather did not hamper hiring last month. Employers added nearly 300,000 jobs to payrolls, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.5 percent.

Despite another strong report, there is little evidence that all the hiring is putting upward pressures on wages.

And there are more than 6.5 million people working part time who would like to have more hours.

Randa Jama pushes airline passengers on wheelchairs to their gates at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. This had been a full-time job when she took it last fall, but then a couple of months later, that changed.

"They told me that you're working only Saturday and Sunday from now," she says.

That cut her hours to 12 a week. Sometimes, her supervisors ask her at the last minute to stay late or do an extra shift. Since she cut back on babysitters, she can't accommodate.

"I let them go because they can't just wait for me to get full time. Now that I want to work full time, no I can't because obviously I changed everything," Jama says.

Higher wages are just one issue workers like Jama care about. They say getting enough hours — and a predictable schedule — are equally important in order to enable them to find additional work or deal with the other obligations in their lives.

"Nowadays you have to say you have open availability and that you're free to work whenever," says Aditi Sen, a researcher for the Center for Popular Democracy, a worker advocacy group.

But pledging open availability limits a worker's ability to plan or get other work.

So far, the law has little to say when it comes to scheduling.

Some states, including Minnesota, Connecticut, Maryland and Massachusetts, are considering legislation that would require several weeks advance notice of schedule changes and institute minimum time off between shifts.

Shannon Henderson says she needs more control over her constantly shifting work schedule. The single mom of two says she asks for more than the 33 hours a week she typically gets working at the Wal-Mart in Sacramento, Calif. But that's also stressful.

"In order to get hours, you have to have open availability," she says. "For instance, last week I worked all late shifts, which was 2 to 11. And then this week I had all early shifts, which was 6:30 to 2."

Wal-Mart last month promised to raise its base wage and give workers more control over their schedules.

Henderson worries the store won't give her more control without cutting back on her hours. She looks for more steady work when she can.

"I do look. But the thing is, with the scheduling being all over the place, it makes it hard for me to actually set time to go look," she says.

Neil Trautwein, vice president of health care policy at the National Retail Federation, says, "Unquestionably those are some difficult hours."

Trautwein says retailers are balancing the consumer demand for 24/7 service, with employees' scheduling concerns. Wal-Mart, he says, is responding to workers' demands.

"That's the way the market self-adjusts and self-regulates," he says.

Jason Diaz, a server at a restaurant in New Haven, Conn., says in order to work 40 hours a week, he's constantly looking for extra gigs.

"Finding the place is the first problem," he says. "And then finding out how to manage that, and travel cost expenses and still being to my next job on time is pretty difficult."

He spends his remaining time trying to find a full-time job and taking care of his son.

"Just in the last two weeks, I got an email from my boss saying, 'Hey, you have to work on Tuesday, so figure out what you're going to do with your son,' " he says.

So Diaz canceled his son's drum lesson and found babysitting, only to discover his boss had made a mistake and he didn't have to work, after all.

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