Showing posts with label Housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Housing. Show all posts

Monday, November 2, 2015

Tomorrow's vote in San Francisco on #housing, #techboom, #SharingEconomy and @Airbnb may be the least-covered important voter referendum on ideas & public policy of the past 15 years. (Thanks #MSM!) Fortunately, @ConorDougherty of @nytimes has a fair and well-written story on it for you to make sense of.


Tomorrow's vote in San Francisco on #housing, #techboom, #SharingEconomy and @Airbnb may be the least-covered important voter referendum on ideas & public policy of the past 15 years. (Thanks #MSM!) Fortunately, @ConorDougherty of @nytimes has a fair and well-written story on it for you to make sense of.


http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/02/san-francisco-ballots-turn-up-anger-over-the-technical-divide.html





































The two inactive Twitter links above can now be found at:
Airbnb Is Inc.'s 2014 Company of the Year 
Disruptive, brazen, and overall brilliant, the (possibly illegal) home-sharing empire has become the biggest lodging provider on Earth--earning it the title of Inc.'s 2014 Company of the Year.
By Burt Helm,  Senior Contributing Writer @burthelm
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201412/burt-helm/airbnb-company-of-the-year-2014.html







Tomorrow's vote in San Francisco on #housing, #techboom, #sharingeconomy and @Airbnb may be the least-covered important voter referendum on ideas & public policy of the past 15 years. 
Fortunately, @ConorDougherty of @nytimes has a fair and well-written story on it for you to make sense of in advance of the predictable spin we can expect from both sides of the debate, where a loss may well be spun as a win and vice-versa.

His article below describes what is arguably the most important vote taking place in the U.S. tomorrow, esp. as far as ideas and getting an accurate reading of the mood of a particular community goes, and yet until I saw this NY Times story today, the #MSM has made no serious attempt to make me fully aware of the universe of both positive and negative consequences possible afterwards for other communities. (Thanks #MSM!)
Just saying...


Dave 


New York Times
TECHNOLOGY
San Francisco Ballots Turn Up Anger Over the Technical Divide
By CONOR DOUGHERTYNOV. 1, 2015


SAN FRANCISCO — Bruce Bennett is 52 and has a bum knee in need of surgery. But two Sundays ago he put on a knee brace and huffed his way up steep hills and dozens of stairs to implore residents to vote against a city measure called Proposition F.
“This is probably the heaviest I’ve ever gotten involved in any campaign,” he said.
Proposition F is a new proposal that would cut the supply of short-term home rentals, or, to quote a few of the people who answered their doors for Mr. Bennett, “the Airbnb thing.”

Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/technology/san-francisco-ballots-turn-up-anger-over-the-technical-divide.html

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Video: 60 Minutes reports on Obama's economy in Orlando and Central Florida: Homeless kids living in cars. If you missed this powerful 60 Minutes story last year, see it Sunday night at 7 p.m. Eastern: heart-breaking hard times for kids in Obama's America - Hard times generation: homeless kids, reported by Scott Pelley; #60Minutes, @ScottPelley, @60Minutes


CBS News 60 Minutes Preview: Hard Times Generation. Above, Arielle and Austin Metzger. CBS News anchor Scott Pelley goes to Central Florida to document a slice of life under Obama you may've missed: kids and their parents forced to live in cars. 
See his report on Sunday night at 7 p.m. Eastern.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7389253n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

CBS News 60 Minutes: Hard times generation: Homeless kids,

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Channel 4 video: The Great British Property Scandal series starts Wednesday; host George Clarke pines for days of pre-Thatcher nationalized housing


Channel 4 video: Architect and campaigner George Clarke invites you to join the campaign to fill Britain's empty homes.

Newer longer video at: http://youtu.be/GnGo_C7sDY0

The Great British Property Scandal | George Clarke | Channel 4

While I can understand how, in the face of lots of seeming misery, it's easy for the host to throw stones and pine for the days of pre-Thatcher nationalized housing, that's hardly the answer now, anymore than simply allowing squatters in the U.S. to "occupy" expensive homes in Cambridge, Chevy Chase or Santa Monica that have been foreclosed, but which still have value, is the answer here for inadequate housing for some.

Thatcher's efforts, while frequently knocked and reviled now among the professional Left, would NOT have been possible without her and the Conservative Party having had something positive and tangible to offer by way of a public policy that the majority of the British people believed was long overdue

And what was that you ask?
How normal.

But THAT is what the Labour Party was vehemently opposed to.
Think about the ethical contortions you have to bend yourself into in order to justify that sort of anti-social policy.

Telegraph TV video: Prime Minister David Cameron -pictured here alongside coalition partner Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems- discusses the government's £400m investment in housing, 95% mortgages, and principles of home ownership. November 21, 2011.

My own experience in living in different parts of the U.S. -with often very different norms and customs- is that the one constant in this country regardless of where you are in the social order is that most people who are given something for nothing -or almost nothing- rarely fully appreciate it or properly maintain what they are given as long or as well as people who actually earned it.
And the same with their kids.


The Telegraph
The Great British Property Scandal, episode one, Channel 4, review
Andrew Marszal reviews the opening episode of The Great British Property Scandal, part of Channel 4's week-long focus on the nation's housing shortage.
By Andrew Marszal
10:00PM GMT 05 Dec 2011
Margaret Thatcher’s time in office left many enduring legacies – crippled unions, privatised industry, even a pop at a third Oscar for Meryl Streep. But few can be as divisive as her “right-to-buy” policy of selling off government-owned council houses, which is now being revamped for the twenty-first century by David Cameron.
Read the rest of the review at:

George Clarke's official website, full of more info about this effort, is at:

This website should be working soon: www.channel4.com/propertyscandal


I've already alerted my stealthy covert affairs team members in Chelsea and Notting Hill to record the show and try to get it to me in fairly short order, though I strongly suspect that some vids of it may start appearing on YouTube within the week before they are pulled off for copyright violations.

As always, if members of the team are captured, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of their actions.

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Florida-based Freddie Mac Loan Contractor Ocwen Has Spotty Record

"ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. We strive to foster change through exposing exploitation of the weak by the strong and the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them."
ProPublica homepage: http://www.propublica.org/

You ought to consider making them a "Favorite" like I do.
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Freddie Mac Loan Contractor Has Spotty Record

by Alexandra Andrews, ProPublica - March 25, 2009 8:28 am EDT

Last month, Freddie Mac introduced a pilot program designed to guide 5,000 homeowners with high-risk mortgages through the loan-modification process, but it outsourced the job to a subprime loan servicer with a history of customer dissatisfaction and run-ins with the federal government.

The Florida-based company, Ocwen Financial Corporation, is a publicly traded financial services company specializing in subprime loan servicing. When asked why it tapped Ocwen for the job, Freddie Mac spokesman Brad German pointed to recent coverage in the New York Times and Time about "the good job that [Ocwen is] doing on the job we're looking for them to do for us." He declined to say whether there had been a bidding process or how much the contract was worth, citing the information as "propriety" and referring further questions to the Federal Housing Finance Authority, which acts as Freddie Mac's conservator (PDF).

An FHFA spokeswoman declined to give ProPublica the contract details. She said that Freddie Mac, which was seized by the federal government in September, is still run as a private-sector firm and not subject to federal procurement rules. Freddie Mac will decide later this year whether to expand the program, and it may hire additional servicers for the job.

Ocwen has, in fact, had an impressive success rate with its recent loan modifications; it said in December that its delinquency rate for borrowers with modified loans was 25 percent, far below the national average of 53 percent. But its business practices have also drawn a wide array of criticism from customers, consumer advocates and the federal government itself.

Trouble With the Feds

Ocwen got a lucrative contract in 2003 to manage and sell thousands of foreclosed properties owned by the Department of Veterans Affairs, but a report from the Government Accountability Office in 2007 panned Ocwen's performance and said the "VA also has not been satisfied with Ocwen's performance": Ocwen racked up $1.3 million in penalties from the VA in the last three quarters of 2005 (at the height of the housing boom) for failing to meet sales targets.

There were other problems too: Ocwen charged the VA for home-upkeep repairs that were never made, the GAO reported. Houses fell into disrepair and were covered in "trash and debris," which the GAO suspects might have lowered property values.

Chairman of House Veterans Affairs Committee Bob Filner (D-CA) told the Palm Beach Post last January that he would recommend the VA not renew Ocwen's contract. "They obviously didn’t do the job," he said. The VA transferred the job to Countrywide when Ocwen's contract expired last year.

According to Ocwen's general counsel Paul Koches, "Ocwen elected for business reasons not to seek a renewal of the VA contract... Ocwen has disputed the VA's charges for sales target shortfalls. We believe the charges are not fair in light of the precipitous drop in the housing market around the country."

But that wasn't Ocwen's only run-in with the federal government.

In 2000, Ocwen Federal Bank, a now-defunct subsidiary, paid $50,000 to settle (PDF) charges from HUD concerning various rule violations on its loan servicing. Four years later, the Office of Thrift Supervision forced Ocwen Federal Bank to sign an agreement (PDF) promising to improve its compliance with fair-lending laws.

John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, cited those regulatory actions when criticizing the VA's choice of Ocwen in 2003. "Why would you want, when you have a repeated history of problems, to expose VA housing to a potential predator?" he asked in American Banker.

Ocwen's Koches pointed out that there was "no fine, penalty or finding of liability" in either the HUD settlement or the OTS agreement. He added, "Ocwen enjoys a good relationship with HUD, most recently confirmed by HUD's reaffirming Ocwen's highest Tier 1 rating." (HUD's tier ranking system measures only servicers' loss mitigation efforts; of the 157 servicers ranked, 111 were in tier 1.)

Customer Complaints

When Freddie Mac introduced its new program, senior vice president of default asset management Ingrid Beckles emphasized the need for strong customer service and phone counseling: "A workout strategy is only as successful as the number of knowledgeable counselors available to answer the phone," she said.

But Ocwen has ranked last in J.D. Power and Associates' survey of customer service at mortgage servicers for the last three years in a row. Frustrated customers point specifically to its tortuous and unhelpful phone services.

Koches said, "We do not believe this survey is a fair representation of our customer service performance since Ocwen was the only subprime loan servicer noted in the survey. Indeed, a customer satisfaction survey conducted by LoanSafe (a nonprofit advocate for homeowners) in 2008 ranked Ocwen in the top ten." But even in that survey, 64 percent of Ocwen customers indicated a high level of dissatisfaction with the company.

Ocwen didn't fare much better with the Better Business Bureau of Central Florida, which has received 520 complaints about Ocwen in the last 36 months and slapped it with an F, its lowest rating. Koches said, "I believe the low rating by the Central Florida BBB is not accurate... True, there are occasional borrower complaints and we do take them seriously. The numbers, however, are statistically insignificant given the large volume of loans we service, several million over the years." (As of Dec. 31, Ocwen serviced 322,515 loans nationwide, according to the company's most recent filing with the SEC.)

According to Jack Guttentag, professor of finance emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the "Mortgage Professor" Web site, loan servicing is an industry ripe for abuse because there's little financial incentive to provide good service: The "customer has already been landed and has no place to go," he writes on his Web site.

Guttentag told ProPublica, "I doubt that there are any servicers that have not been accused of predatory practices, but the ones you hear about the most are the independents -- those who service only and don't originate loans [like Ocwen]. The large originators like Wells, Chase and Citi can hurt themselves as originators by being aggressive as servicers." Ocwen has in fact been accused of predatory practices in a slew of lawsuits in the last few years. Frequent allegations include that Ocwen falsely classifies timely payments as late, charges unwarranted fees and improperly starts foreclosure proceedings.

Koches denied those allegations, saying "Ocwen absolutely does not falsely claim borrower payments are late to start a foreclosure. To the contrary, we do everything possible to avoid foreclosures." He also said, "The claims for unwarranted fees are inaccurate" and pointed to an April 2005 ruling in which a federal judge ruled that loan contracts signed by the plaintiffs authorized Ocwen to charge certain fees. That case now consists of 72 consolidated suits against Ocwen in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. When asked about the 2005 ruling, Laura Schlichtmann, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told ProPublica, "The plaintiff's position is that the ruling is limited to the facts of the Soto case [one of the consolidated cases] and furthermore that it pertains to only one of numerous categories of disputed fees."

Notwithstanding Ocwen's track record, many consumer advocates were quick to praise the company's recent foray into loan modifications. David Berenbaum, executive vice president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which has been highly critical of Ocwen in the past, told ProPublica that Ocwen now leads the servicing industry with regard to loan workouts. That shift signals what may be an unavoidable reality: Those looking to fix the housing crisis will have to rely on loan servicers without sterling reputations, because there aren't many out there with them.

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Federal Housing Finance Authority homepage: http://www.fhfb.gov/

Prof. Jack M. Guttentag's website, Mortgage Professor: http://www.mtgprofessor.com/Default.htm

Jack M. Guttentag is Professor of Finance Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and founder of GHR Systems, Inc., a mortgage technology company.