Re:A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned
by scatters on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @05:47AM
(#17808296)
> people were foreclosed on when they should not have been
That's not what happened here, though; the homeowner managed to avoid foreclosure despite not servicing the mortgage, precisely because the banks messed up the paperwork.
There are victims in the overall saga: people who were missold mortgages that they were never going to be able to service, at rates higher than they were entitled to, who lost their savings as a result. But they don't feature in this story.
Re:A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned
by intended on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @06:37AM
(#17808471)
Right, this is NOT that story, and I am not saying it is.
But that story has been written, as have pages upon pages of what happened.
Reading through it all and being well informed will likely be the realm of a few people, the best we can hope for is to be directed to other resources.
The most likely answer though is not a lack of creativity - because its very hard to imagine the harm caused by these, relatively, arcane legal instruments.
There is a harpers article linked in the story, it should be illustrative of the clear harm being done to normal people, and how corporations made a calamitous end run around legal procedure - the same issue which is happening today (the "two-fer" paragraph).
If you need faces, realize that people were foreclosed on when they should not have been, those deeds were NEVER legally owned by the banks because the banks and their intermediaries didn't follow up on the paper work.
Yet those people got evicted, and banks claimed ownership.
An economy is largely predicated on working systems of assessment and legal redressal, more so for First World economies.
And this happens because, as you said, its hard to imagine the harm being caused.