Banks Booting Families and Leaving Homes to Rot: A Tour of Blighted Homes in Los Angeles

Photo Credit: Melissa Chadburn

Los Angeles has an ordinance that fines banks for leaving foreclosed homes in disrepair. So why are so many of them blighted, dragging down whole neighborhoods?

June 11, 2012

These enormous economic shifts imprint people at an incredibly deep level. We feel it. When we wake up in the morning. We are going through the pain of this one. We are having our lives changed by this one.  We take with us through our days the big sack of worry for our kids with this one. It’s on our streets. You see it in the overgrown lawns and boarded-up windows of some of those bank-owned homes.

There’s a loss. A deep loss of trust. And it stays even when the DOW is up. Even when the tickers are going and there’s hopeful news on the radio about the housing market. We are suffering a kind of punishment from this recession. From all the terrible lies that came before. This is what remains. Distrust. Fear. Worry.

We know the foreclosure crisis began with the lies. The banks gave home loans to anyone with a pulse, provided they had another sucker institution lined up to buy the loan. How did they make these loans in the first place? By committing every kind of lending fraud imaginable—particularly by entering fake data on home loan applications magically turning minimum wage janitors into creditworthy wage earners.  READ MORE