There’s something ghoulish about making a business out of selling overpriced houses to people with low and/or uncertain incomes who can’t find any housing they can afford—and then, kicking their families out of the only homes they know and have already invested in.  Better to have some part of the housing sector arranged on a sell-or-rent interchange basis where part of rent goes to pay on mortgage (even though small) and/or mortgage payments work as partial payment on loan and when the owners can’t pay, homes automatically go into a lower payment as rent but families can still occupy them.

Of course this is too “un-businesslike”, too “level”,
too “humane.” Not “practical”—for capitalism, etc. It’s not a “system” if only a small percentage of people benefit.  So something has got to give—literally - and poor people can’t do the giving. That leaves the rich to dust off their souls and rejoin the human race.

bpawk,

Banks have to practice ‘due diligence’ to ensure the signer can afford payments.

I thinks the banks didn’t perform this practice when assigning the infamous ARM balloon payments.

Alot of street people can sign their name.

patrickhenry,

the banks couldn’t have taken the risk without the homeowner signing on the dotted line.

bpawk,

Don’t forget about the bank.  They took a risk in order to make profits.

No profits, no bonus.

People who bought homes they couldn’t really afford in the first place have hopefully learned their lesson - the banks couldn’t have lent them the money unless the borrower signed on the dotted line.  The borrower knew he was taking a risk, but it looks like in a lot of cases, he lost.  That’s the way it should be - if you take a risk, whether wall street or main street, you could win but you could also lose: if you win, only you win but if you lose, only you should lose, not the taxpayer.

This story seems inaccurate to me.  For one thing, I have read that the rate of foreclosures has declined sharply because of the scandals about robosigning and the uncertainty as to who owns properties whose mortgages have been transferred many times.  Secondly, it is my understanding that many observers are not at all sure the real-estate market has bottomed out yet.  Until it does, large corporations are unlikely to be interested in it.

It is curious that the fall of real estate prices back into the realms of sanity and thus accessibility to the not-so-wealthy is seen as a subject for protest.

Too bad we didn’t let the banks fail, we could have benefited from that too.