Fighting for Low-Income Homeowners
Check out this really awesome profile of a young lawyer in Washington, D.C., who is fighting to help low-income homeowners keep their homes:
Jennifer, a 30-year-old attorney and Equal Justice Works Americorps Legal Fellow at the Legal Aid Society, specializes in navigating this frustrating system for Washington, D.C. residents who qualify for loan modifications, but are trapped in an endless maze of contradictory information. She tirelessly works to secure permanent, affordable modifications for families who would otherwise be homeless.
Ngai is helping struggling homeowners navigate the federal government’s Home Affordable Mortgage Program, which civil rights groups have long worried was not strong enough to really address the foreclosure crisis.
In April 2009 – just two months after HAMP was created – The Leadership Conference and nearly 100 national and local groups sent a letter to the Senate urging it to support an amendment that would give bankruptcy judges the ability to rework mortgages to an affordable rate:
Our organizations long have supported legislation to empower bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages on primary residences so as to provide the “stick” financially strapped homeowners desperately need to get their lenders to work with them to prevent avoidable foreclosures. Absent this stick, all the voluntary programs that have been put in place during the last 18 months have failed to produce the modifications necessary to save American families and repair the faltering housing market.
Nearly two years after it was created, the program is still not enough. The special inspector in charge of HAMP testified before a House subcommittee a few weeks ago that only 238,000 of the 522,000 modifications completed by December 31, 2010, can even be attributed to the program.
This despite the fact that the program was touted as being able to help as many as 4 million homeowners.