Bill introduced to make it quicker to foreclose on homes.

[EastsideAl]

Some folks here seem to have lost sight of the fact that this happened because banks and mortgage companies, and their employees, were incentivized to sell and write as many mortgages as possible - good, bad, or indifferent. The big incentive being that those loans could be sold on the secondary market and/or bundled into saleable securities for quick easy profits in a ludicrously overheated market. On both ends were sales people pushing this scam on both underinformed home buyers and underinformed investors who were told by purported "experts" [[including many in government, and supposedly impartial, but completely bought off, appraisers and rating agencies) that nothing could go wrong. And towards the end of the bubble they couldn't write the mortgages fast enough to satisfy the demand for the securities, which is part of what led to a massive amount of mortgage fraud.

Even with all that, a lot of the homes that have been foreclosed on since the crash were actually bought by people who could afford them - at the time they took out the loan. But apparently nobody here was among the millions of people who lost their jobs or businesses in the recession, or has even ever lost a job. Because they don't seem to realize that people who lose jobs - through no fault of their own - can sometimes find themselves falling behind on their mortgage.

The big problem for these people has been that once they fell behind, even if they subsequently got a new job that would enable them to start paying again, they found the banks completely unwilling to give them any kind of a break, to modify their mortgage, to restructure their payments, or even to accept back payment in full. Many thousands of foreclosures happened to people in this very position. So apparently, despite claims you may read here and elsewhere, the banks did want to foreclose on them and take their houses after all, and pretty desperately at that. Certainly that's the only rational conclusion that can be drawn from their actions [[rather than the theories put forth by some here). But people like Bham apparently choose to believe that the multitude of reports of this kind of treatment are false and that thousands of people are just plain liars.

It also never seems to occur to the Bhams of the world that perhaps homeowners in Detroit may get treated a little differently by banks and other institutions than homeowners in places like, well, B'ham. I can tell you from first-hand experience that they most certainly do, and that the relative lack of responsiveness and often just plain decency and respect is glaring.