The sucky thing is, no matter WHO gets sent to Washinhton the lobbyists corrupt them almost instantly.

The sucky thing is no matter WHO gets sent to Washington the lobbyists seem to corrupt them almost instantly.

The torture here is that a neighborhood of houses holding steady at values of $20-30K is no more viable than one with doubling or tripling values. (I've lived in both.)

With a market value of $25K, there is no such thing as a home equity loan to fix a rotting roof. Winter heat bills may be outlandish, but pulling together cash for good windows is difficult, and are unlikely to increase the value of the place.

Landlords can achieve good cash flow by investing more in a property than it is worth, but too often these areas are overrun by unscrupulous slumlords who invest the minimum while overcharging on rent. Worst case, they juggle depreciation as long as possible before reselling; best case, they hold on until a market surge or a renewal project puts more cash in their pockets.

That's where Obama has it exactly right: A stable, healthy economy requires a viable middle class... decent enough jobs that empower home buying at reasonable prices AND sustainable home ownership... ability to buy tools and materials for DIY fixes and improvements... and, of course, the means to hire Joe the Plumber in an emergency.

Well, well, well, "the bailout is now the hottest lobbying game in town."

Interesting. Now who do you want running your country? The guy who doesn't take money from lobbyists and only has a few on staff? Or the guy whose campaign staff is nothing BUT lobbyists, and who has been previously reprimanded for working with lobbyists?

I've made my pick.

Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed because of the greed of the financial industry and corrupt mortgage market. One example I read about today was the fact that in the county of Merced in California, 84% of the homeowners have negative equity, over 56% of the homes are in foreclosure, etc. What will it take to come back from this type of wealth destruction?

I recall reading a year ago about a black middle-class neighborhood in Cleveland where the homes were owned outright and then lost in refinance deals that couldn't be paid.

There has to be some kind of restructuring of these loans. Say setting a new 30 year fixed-rate. Maybe even offering the deal to homeowners who aren't (yet) in trouble.

The crisis wasn't a surprise. Any owner in an area like Slavic having paid a mortgage in the last year has not paid much attention to the going ons or the market. If they hadn't refinanced prior, they really dropped the ball.

I know it's a poor way of looking at it, but if you can't get out of the way, you'd better try and catch on.

Is reacting to Greenspan's little "admission" really unprintable on this site? Because my reaction when I first heard that he found a flaw in his ideology was, "No shit, you stupid cocksucking little troll! Fuck you and fuck Ayn Rand's filthy corpse!"

If that is unprintable, then no reaction to Greenspan's statement is possible, because I'm pretty sure everyone in America thought the exact same thing as I did when they heard the news.

I'm trying to imagine being someone whose home is in Slavic Village, who has worked hard, been responsible, and made all her mortgage payments, and who sees her property values plummet because of the burnt out and boarded up houses all around me. In particular, I'm trying to imagine my reaction to Alan Greenspan saying that he had "found a flaw" in his ideology, or to the news that "the bailout is now the hottest lobbying game in town." Unfortunately, it's unprintable.

I know too many of these people; they're just a wee bit up the road from where we live---and if I go but a few miles in the other direction, I can stand on a hilltop at night and see the rock-solid flame that is Terminal Tower at night.

As for being unprintable, I think what ought to be unprintable is the detail which I could apply in describing how the bailout is now being used. I've read only recently---last night, to be exact, that a competing bank was able to take several billion dollars' worth of that "bailout money" and used it to buy National City Bank---at a fire-sale price. I'll wager that "the new management" won't be as quick to offer those "fire-sale values" to their new customers' mortgages.

I can say this, though, in that the wages of profitmongery are an addiction more psychological than they are physical, as that addicition is based upon the notion of power over others. The solution to that addiction---the cure---oft-times must be more physical than it is psychological, as the addict only experiences the positive traits of his addiction, while the negative traits bestow themselves upon the innocent.

How might an individual react, when they are forced through no desire or need of their own, to steal in support of another's drug habit? Would they not curse the addict, demanding incessantly that he give up his beloved euphoria, and then---seeing that it is not to be---apply the physical means of an intervention to destroy that abuse?

Such might well be the case, and I think, Hilzoy, it is the intervention's exacting details of which you dare not speak. It is the line in the sand beyond which the blossom of activism transforms into the bayonet of revolution....

"They have higher tax rates than the surrounding suburbs; as a result, people who can move to those suburbs do so; as a result, the city's tax base shrinks, and it has to raise taxes some more; rinse and repeat."

Compounding that problem is large companies, having threatened to leave if asked to pay taxes, are now exempt. In our city, one such corporation (whose CEO is in the $20+ million annual compensation bracket) not only doesn't pay taxes, but we-the-people built them a shiny new headquarters downtown, else they'd leave. Best part? They donated a tiny fraction of the cost of their building to our new public library and got their name over the door. Good corporate citizens.

I have lived in the Cleveland area for over 25 years. I wasn't born here so I do have a somewhat objective viewpoint on the situation. The description in the article is somewhat acurate but it totally misses trhe forest for the trees.
The meltdown that happened in Cleveland and I'm sure other cities can not be attributed strictly to bad mortgages. If you don't look at the whole picture your just refusing to face whats real and what's not.
A combination of job loss, bad underlying economy, net losses in wages and buying power and yes mortgage malfeasance along with other issues have led us to this point.
Please don't look for a simple answer to a complex question because it's just not going to work.

I think it was David Brancacio of PBS' NOW program that did an episode on this Cleveland neighborhood, and discussed that the mortgage assistance/relief groups in Ohio had seen the problems coming several years ago. They tried to get the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature to address it, but they wouldn't.

I spent the first 35 years of my life in Cleveland. I moved to Charlotte six years ago because there weren't any jobs in Cleveland. The city has been dying for a long time. The leaders of the city spent millions of dollars and time and energy trying to save the steel mill instead of investing in bringing service industries to the city. What a mess.

We're in for a world of hurt. I wrote the same thing four hours later after I woke up, and I had not read this.