Dec

Foreclosure Lessons From the City of Cleveland

You can’t give credit to just anyone. No matter what your intentions, if an individual is not credit worthy, giving said individual a loan is risky business. Obama hasn’t learned that lesson. The Community Reinvestment Act hucksters haven’t learned that lesson. Barney Frank hasn’t learned that lesson. So expect more of the same.

NewsBusters picked up on a report out of Cleveland getting to the heart of the foreclosure crisis in that city. Sadly, it was so predictable to anyone with any common sense or integrity. Those are two qualities sorely lacking in our public “leaders” today.

If there’s a Ground Zero for America’s foreclosure mess outside of much of California and metro Las Vegas, it’s probably Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio city known in most of the rest of the state as the Mistake on the Lake.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Mark Gillespie got out from behind his desk, committed some good old-fashioned journalism, and went looking for the mistakes that exacerbated the town’s breathtaking home foreclosure rate. Lo and behold, he found that city government itself contributed mightily and extraordinarily negligently to the debacle. Go far enough into Gillespie’s report, and you will also find an implicit admission that the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) also played a pivotal role (bold is mine): ….

Read the whole thing and weep.

H/T Lew

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