apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I think these newly proposed laws to "help" people in their self-imposed "mortgage crisis" are crap. On the surface, these renter laws make sense because the renter had no part in the mortgage crisis, they just happened to rent from the wrong people. Which means that a whole lot of people are going to be flooding the renters market all at once. But what about the people who were affected by their landlords foreclosures last month? Or last year? It seems unfair.

Oh great... so now the house that has already lost value and is unsellable as it is will now have the added burden of inherited renters, thereby making the house lose even more value. And the more the house is under water, the greater the likelihood that the owners will just mail in the keys and allow it to go to foreclosure. If anything, this will help to increase the rate of foreclosures dramatically, which means you have a lot more people displaced from their homes.

This is bad legislation. The only legislation I think makes sense would be to allow the renters to sue landlords for renting out properties that are on the verge of foreclosure, i.e., the landlord's intentional nondisclosure of material information. The landlord should be obligated to find new housing for the tenant and to pay for moving costs, etc. Throughout this whole real estate bubble crash, I find it amazing that the very people who helped inflate the bubble- the idiotic real estate "investors" and flippers- are the ones who are walking away relatively unscathed. It's the banks, the renters and the U.S. tax payers who get screwed over because of these nitwits. People who default on loans, which were granted in good faith, should be obligated to repay every single penny, no matter how long it takes.

hear hear, hejiranyc.

This is pretty scary for someone like me who owns a condo.

While I feel bad for a renter who may lose their apartment, I don't feel bad for the jackass with the blackberry and bluetooth who thought they were a big time real estate investor and bought multiple "investment" properties to rent out until they sold.

I do sort of feel sorry for some of the owners who are victims of foreclosure that were duped by this new breed of mortgage broker armed with a new and improved arsenal of instruments designed to get you a mortgage no matter what.

But as a condo owner, I worry about the foreclosures around me bringing down the market value and those foreclosed properties being rented out without screening the tenants.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how everything shakes out. Even though there is a high rate of foreclosure in Chicago and massive inventory, average selling prices and rents are not falling at this point.

People who default on loans, which were granted in good faith, should be obligated to repay every single penny, no matter how long it takes.

The bulk of the loans made over the past 5 years in this country were total garbage, and anybody with a lick of sense in the mortgage business knew it. These lenders were supposed to be professionals. It now turns out they were about as professional as the guys selling speakers out of the back of their trucks. Northern Rock in the UK has already failed - look for several major US banks to go under, next.

This is what happens when you turn a formerly heavily-regulated, reliable, professional industry into a libertarian carnival sideshow.

This hits home. No sooner had I bookmarked Laure's eviction post than I received my own owner-occupancy eviction notice, albeit an illegal one. Why? My landlady wants to move from her bigger unit into my single (we're in a triplex) and rent the bigger one out for higher rent - she needs the money and will otherwise face foreclosure.

New legislation or not, I decided I didn't want to take the chance of an eviction by the lender if the place does get foreclosed. So - I'm moving! I think things will work out for the best, but believe me, this is not what I was planning on doing this month :)

Loans granted in "good faith"...HA! I haven't been a part of the mortgage industry for over 2 decades and could see from a VERY distant view that there was so much smoke and mirrors going on to get people into a home anyway they could it was just plain unethical and wrong. Many lenders made a mockery of home ownership. Not all, but plenty of loan officers were borderline scam artists.

I agree with Shari--the whole food chain was complicit in this melt down, from the retail real estate side--brokers and agents, to mortgage scammers, to the banks and the Wall Street financial wizards, to the guys selling these securitized morgages around the worold to the so-called Federal regulators. Shame all the way around.