foreclosure and financial crisis

It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to close the wealth gap, we must shift our focus from the gap itself to the policies, conditions, and systems that spawned it.

There are people who believe that the foreclosure crisis occurred because too many unqualified borrowers became homeowners. What actually happened was …

Headrights and redlining were parts of a systemic structure designed to aid some and debilitate others. Their repercussions are still felt.

News from—and affecting—the community development world. This week: rent burden relief, policy suggestions for worker co-ops, a new credit scoring model?, states take on housing, and more.

These books not only offer something of a window on what is—or is not—going on in small cities, but useful pointers for practitioners working in the types of cities described.

A Cleveland neighborhood made famous as an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis works its way back to stability. Here’s how.

Bank-seized properties in these communities of color have higher rates of neglect, and the situation has prompted a lawsuit.

HMDA is the key to preventing predatory behavior, not the cause of it, so how can an economics professor from George Washington University claim that HMDA can facilitate large-scale identity theft?

With funds from a settlement between the New York State Attorney General and major banks, 76 New York state municipalities are working to get abandoned and deteriorating homes back into productive use.

These ideas aren’t new, but pulling them together in a collective, coherent way will push back against those who, like their predecessors of 80, 70, 60 and 50 years ago, would deny long-term stability to those for reasons more than just the color of their money.

Some community development organizations think the foreclosure crisis is over, but there’s a new emergency within the more vulnerable segments of our population—and it is hitting the elderly particularly hard, says Lou Tisler, who recently left Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) of Greater Cleveland after 12 years as executive director. That new crisis is tax foreclosures—the sale of a property due to unpaid tax liabilities.

It seems like an overstatement, but data disclosure can help prevent the next financial crisis.   In the run-up to the Great Recession, subprime and other abusive lenders made loans […]