[http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-11-02/business/30353404_1_face-foreclosure-bayview-district-bayview-residents]
If there's a ground zero for recession-induced home foreclosures in San Francisco, it's the Bayview district.
Close to one-third of the San Francisco homes that were facing foreclosure in August are in the largely African American neighborhood.
By 2012, according to figures provided by RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosures nationwide, more than 1,400 homes in the Bayview's 94124 ZIP code area will have been foreclosed.
More than 100 of them are currently listed for sale on a Yahoo real estate page.
Bayview residents who say they were victims of fraudulent or excessively burdensome mortgages and now face foreclosure sought to draw attention to their situation Tuesday.
Bringing the media out in force - along with a city supervisor, members of the Service Employees International Union and a small contingent from Occupy San Francisco - was a press release announcing that one of the residents, Carolyn Craig, had "re-entered" the three-bedroom home on Quesada Street her family had lived in for 52 years before being evicted in January.
"If you ask me the question 'Why are you doing this,' I am here today because I'm reclaiming my home," she said, to cheers from a crowd of about 60.
In fact, the home had been "reclaimed" a few days ago, a neighbor told me, "but we didn't want to tell people ahead of time we were breaking in."
Craig, who is back living in the house with her husband and two daughters, would not say what led up to the foreclosure, including details of loans the family may have taken out over the years. She said she had been defrauded by a now-bankrupt predatory lender, and that the company picking up the loan, Bayview Mortgage Capital in Coral Gables, Fla., had refused various entreaties.
"I've attempted to pay my mortgage, tried to modify the loan, even sued them, but they haven't worked with me," she said.
When I called the company, a voice mail message said the office was closed and that the mailbox was full. That might have been because supporters, at the urging of the activists, had earlier attempted to call the company demanding it rescind the foreclosure.
"You see a concentration of bad loans in the Bayview," said Grace Martinez, an organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which helped neighborhood residents stage Tuesday's event. "There seems to have been a concerted effort to deliberately target these neighborhoods. And nothing is being done for them."
Neighbors I spoke to agreed. Craig's "father built the house. How can a bank take it?" wondered Darryl Hughes, who said he has lived in the Bayview for 48 years, and knew the Craig family well.
Vivian Richardson, who lives one block up from the Craig family on Quesada Street, said she faces eviction on Dec. 31, despite attempts to negotiate with the lender, a Delaware bank. Richardson, who has become something of a neighborhood activist herself, said she's planning to stay.
"We've had enough people around here losing their homes," she said.
Whether the Bayview action will spark a larger movement, as residents and their outside supporters hope, remains to be seen. Martinez said her statewide organization is looking to highlight the issue of home foreclosures in poorer neighborhoods at a scheduled march and rally in Oakland today.
How Craig's mortgage lender responds also remains to be seen. Should it move to evict her once again, "we have a lot of people standing by to occupy the house with her," Richardson said.
Collateral damage: Some Bay Area fallout in connection with the collapse of MF Global, the East Coast investment bank run by former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, which bet disastrously on European debt.
Listed as an unsecured creditor in the firm's bankruptcy filing Tuesday is Oracle Corp., which is owed $302,704. "We decline to comment," said an Oracle spokeswoman.
San Francisco's RS Investments, a subsidiary of the Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America, turns out to have been MF Global's second-largest shareholder, with 7.8 percent of its shares. Fortunately, the firm sold all of its stock in MF Global last week, according to spokeswoman Erin Burke.
Asked to what extent, if any, it had taken a bath on the sale, Burke said the firm does not comment on individual past or present investments.
People march along Quesada Avenue to protest the numerous foreclosures in San Francisco's Bayview district. RealtyTrak says more than 1,400 homes in the 94124 ZIP code will have been foreclosed by 2012.
Credit: Brant Ward / The Chronicle
No comments:
Post a Comment