Predatory lending takes a verbal beating

More than 300 people turned out in Minneapolis on Thursday night to voice concerns and call for stronger consumer protection from predatory lenders.

It's an issue especially important on the North Side, where residents are losing homes to foreclosures at an alarming rate. More than 60 percent of foreclosures in Hennepin County have been in north Minneapolis. More than 1,400 homes in the area have been sold at foreclosure auctions in the past 16 months.

At a congressional hearing at the Minneapolis Central Library, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison of Minneapolis said he wants the voices of people who have fallen prey to unscrupulous lenders to be heard in Washington.

"Predatory lending foreclosures have torn holes in the fabric of neighborhoods not only in Minneapolis and St. Paul but across Minnesota and the nation as a whole," Ellison said.

It's not only families' dreams that are ruined, he said.

"Boarded-up homes drive down local property values and are the locus of crime and other illegal activities," Ellison said.

He pointed at a big map of current foreclosures in north Minneapolis, covered with red dots showing a sea of homes lost. He called the concentration of foreclosures in his neighborhood shocking.

Ellison, a freshman Democrat who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, is sponsoring legislation that would provide greater protection by regulating the industry, and he's using a new law in Minnesota as a model for it.

Sharon Glover of Golden Valley testified that she and her late husband, Gleason Glover, once head of the Urban League, bought their home for $94,000 years ago. She refinanced in 1999 through a subprime lender, Ocwen Financial Corp., hoping for payments lower than the $1,200 she was paying.

Her payments shot up to $1,550 a month, and she had to work with lawyers to get her mortgage paperwork, which showed her loan amount had mushroomed to $162,000. Later, the payments rose to $1,945 a month. Then she lost her job. Today, she lives on Social Security and a small annuity payment. She has stopped taking her medicine to make ends meet.

Even though she made all her payments, albeit late, her home went into foreclosure and was to be sold in a sheriff's sale on Aug. 7. The sheriff's sale was called off after her pro bono lawyers filed a class-action suit in federal court against the lender, she said.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., a co-sponsor of Ellison's legislation, said while Minnesota has one of the highest home-ownership rates in the nation, subprime loans have been used to take away opportunities for many families. That's due to a lack of regulation, she said.

The goal of the predatory lenders is to strip equity by refinancing multiple times, McCollum said.

In Ramsey County alone, McCollum said, there will be 1,900 homes forced to foreclose by the end of 2007 -- a 30 percent increase over last year. And it's a 500 percent increase in foreclosures since 2003, McCollum said.

Barb Johnson, president of the Minneapolis City Council, said foreclosures in the city more than doubled in the past year. In the first quarter of 2006, she said, the city experienced 326 foreclosures. In the first quarter of 2007, that number was 678, she said.

It's the poorest residents, many of them minorities, who have been hit hardest, Johnson said.

Foreclosure prevention services have been expanded in the city, including through the new 311 call-in system, in which people are encouraged to report their experiences with predatory lending.

Attorney General Lori Swanson said homes have been turned into a "financial liability" for too many Minnesotans, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, with rising costs for utilities, energy and more.

In 2006, more than 80 percent of people who took out home refinancing did so to pay bills and non-mortgage debt, Swanson said. "We've seen many loans sold with no regard for the borrower's ability to pay," she said.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said foreclosures are concentrated in four areas, where there's been little investment for decades. The city is trying in many ways to revitalize those neighborhoods.

In January 2006, there were 546 vacant homes in the city. Today, there are nearly 1,200 vacant buildings, most of them residential, he said.

"We need to be able to turn these neighborhoods around, but unless we do something about foreclosures, we are not going to be able to do what we need to do," Coleman said

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said Congress wants to help the Federal Housing Administration become better able to make subprime loans. It is helpful, he said, to hear from people affected, as well as from the advocacy groups and banking officials who also testified.

Also on Thursday, Minnesota Housing Commissioner Tim Marx and Commerce Commissioner Glenn Wilson announced $500,000 in additional state funding for a new foreclosure prevention effort in areas where residents' credit scores suggest that they could lose their homes.

Joy Powell • 612-673-7750 • jpowell@startribune.com