As America's soft housing sector continues to flounder and the dream of homeownership is being ripped to shreds by a record-setting numbers of foreclosures, student at the FAMU College of Law (pictured) have taken to hard-hit Central Florida neighborhoods to offer assistance to homeowners in harms way.While, the U.S. economy is growing, if only barely so, the recovery has yet to reach the housing sector, where prices remain depressed and foreclosures are on the rise. In September alone more than 100,000 new Americans received foreclosure notices.
From Voice of America News:
Adding to the woes are reports of widespread abuses in the foreclosure process itself, with allegations that lenders haphazardly signed off on a multitude of foreclosures with faulty or even falsified paperwork.
Lender's goals are to move through a foreclosure case as quickly as they can, said Florida foreclosure attorney Christopher Immel. "That cut short people's opportunities to try to get back on their feet."
Experts suggest that bringing down the U.S. foreclosure rate could take years and the fallout could rival that of the 2008 financial meltdown or the implosion of many high-technology U.S. firms nearly a decade ago.
"This foreclosure mess is escalating to as big a mess as the mortgage crisis," said Atlanta-based financial analyst Ty Young. "And I do believe, at some point in the future, we'll talk about the dot com [stock] crisis, the banking crisis, and the foreclosure crisis in the same light."
Most foreclosures stem from a borrower losing a job and lacking income to pay the mortgage. But the drop in U.S. home values in recent years has led to a new class of non-payers: borrowers whose mortgages exceed the value of their homes and who simply walk away from the investment.