Text by Sarah Phelan
Courtesy of the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation.
As the Guardian’s report about foreclosures in San Francisco reveals, they are concentrated in the southeast, where working people and communities of color live, making efforts to recapture these properties and resell them as affordable housing units a worthy endeavor.
But for those who believe buying these properties isn’t the best use of city money in stringent budgetary times, it’s worth looking at what’s happening policy-wise elsewhere in the Bay Area.
Last month, a dozen Democratic U.S senators joined their Republican colleagues to defeat a bill that would have allowed judges to reduce mortgages in bankruptcy courts. President Obama, facing strong opposition from the nation’s surviving banks, did not pressure lawmakers to support the measure, and the Senate killed a plan to spare thousands of homeowners from foreclosure through bankruptcy.
Steven Zuckerman, managing director of the California branch of Self-Help, one of the largest community development financial institutions (CDFI) in the United States, says his organization was deeply involved in supporting that legislation. And he doesn’t buy detractors arguments that lowering mortgages in bankruptcy courts would cause banks to raise other people’s mortgage rates.”
‘The bill only included mortgages that already exist,” Zuckerman, who blames the bill’s failure on the “lobbying of bankers’ associations,” told me.
According to information posted at its website, the North Carolina-based Self-Help has already provided billions in financing to small business owners and nonprofits nationwide in an effort to create and protect ownership and economic opportunities for minorities, women, rural residents, and low-wealth families and communities.
And locally, Self-Help is one of several CDFIs trying to help communities like San Francisco’s southeast sector and North Richmond in the East Bay, which have been hard hit by the recent wave of foreclosures sweeping the area.
”We do have a program and a product that we are trying to make available to groups that work in areas with high foreclosures,” Zuckerman said.