40 Mortgage Counseling Agencies to Receive Aid, Hire More Counselors
CRC, 10 financial institutions and two foundations announced grant awards to 40 California mortgage counseling agencies through the California Home Ownership Preservation Initiative to help them better respond to the overflow of clients their offices are serving.
Initiative funds will be used to hire 58 mortgage counselors statewide, who are expected to serve 40,000 troubled home loan borrowers, predominantly in low-moderate income neighborhoods that were targeted with predatory subprime loans. The funds will also help mortgage counseling agencies’ outreach to working families faced with foreclosure.
Click here to read the press release.
California Measure Could Cap Interest Rates on Payday Loans at 36%
A bill sponsored by three California legislators aims to give consumers the same protections against “Payday Loans”that were signed into law by President Bush in October of 2006 for military personnel. These protections include an interest rate cap of 36% on all payday loans. The measure, AB 2845, jointly authored by Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), Speaker-Elect Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblymember Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) would extend current federal law for military personnel to all California consumers.
Click here to read the news advisory.
Support California Mortgage Lending Reform Bills
CRC and several other California organizations strongly support a package of bills in the California State Assembly, which will help address the foreclosure crisis and implement important mortgage reforms to protect future California borrowers and the economy.
Write to your Senate and Assembly Members in Support of the following Foreclosure Crisis and Mortgage Reform Package:
AB 69 (Lieu)
AB 1830 (Lieu)
AB 2880 (Wolk)
AB 2359 (Jones)
AB 2740 (Brownley)
SB 1137 (Perata)
Click here to read CRC's letter to the Assembly
32 CA Groups ask Federal Reserve to Do More to Prevent Foreclosures
As the foreclosure crisis worsens, the Federal Reserve Board (the Fed) is proposing rules to restrict abusive mortgage lending practices. While this is a good step, 32 California groups, led by the California Reinvestment Coalition, today assert that not enough is being done to help working families and their neighborhoods. In a letter to the Fed, the groups encourage stronger rules to protect families from being sold loans they cannot afford.
Click here to read a copy of the letter.
Click here to read the press release.
Bank of America:
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Dozens of demonstrators chanted loudly against greed, home foreclosure and subprime lending. They picketed outside the Federal Reserve Bank in Los Angeles April 28 with signs that read “Bank of America: Don’t Foreclose on America,” and “American Dreams, Not Countrywide Schemes.”
Some were mortgage counselors who had seen too many working families lose their homes because they were sold bad loans. Others were Countrywide borrowers on the brink of foreclosure, exhausted and frustrated after spending months on the phone desperately seeking a loan modification that would keep them in their home.
All of them had one clear message: Bank of America should not be allowed to acquire Countrywide Financial without a plan that addresses how they will help the 600,000 Countrywide borrowers currently faced with foreclosure.
The demonstration took place after a press conference hosted by the California Reinvestment Coalition, where mortgage borrowers and counselors shared their experiences with Countrywide, and their fears about the merger. CRC members and allies called on Bank of America to offer a business plan to solve Countrywide’s huge role in the mortgage crisis.
Click here to read the Full Story and CRC's Testimony at the Federal Reserve hearings on the Merger.
