AlterNet: Home Loan Scamming Is Still Going Strong -- and Now You're Paying for It

[marmar]

Home Loan Scamming Is Still Going Strong -- and Now You're Paying for It

By Yasha Levine, AlterNet. Posted June 16, 2009.

Welcome to subprime swindle 2.0: the feds' desperate attempt to reinflate the popped housing bubble.



Everything the real estate industry tells you is a hustle. No industry is more geared toward pumping up the positive and burying anything remotely negative, leaving you -- and truth -- out in the cold.

The crash has not made real estate agents any more honest, but at least the gap between the industry's crazed optimism and stark reality has grown so obvious that even the real estate industry can't hide it anymore.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Victorville, Calif., an exurb of Los Angeles situated in the high desert where housing bubbled up higher than just about anywhere at the peak of the subprime-lending craze and is still in free fall today.

These days, there are a lot of lies and broken dreams buried in the gravelly sand on which Victorville was built. During the last real estate boom, this barren wasteland was the mecca of low-income homeownership, proof that the American Dream was within reach of all.

Tract-home developers stripped away the rocks and tumbleweeds and Joshua trees, replacing them with mazes of curvy streets and cul de sacs with soothing names like Cottontail Drive, Steeplechase Road and Ladybird Lane, lining them with the cheapest McMansions in California. Things exploded out of control this past decade, with the population doubling to 100,000 in just eight years. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140683/home_loan_scamming_is_still_going_strong_--_and_now_you%27re_paying_for_it/

[bertman]

1. This is astonishing to read. How the hell can this still be going on?

[Demeter]

2. Has Anyone Been Indicted? Have Regulations Been Written?

No. That's why and how it keeps on going.

Even the banking supervision is still non-functional. Nothing has changed.

[necso]

3. r&k

[tom_paine]

4. ROFL. Nothing can stop the Fall once it's begun.

And ol' B'rer Rabbit, if he can't get his way one way, he'll try another way.

And bye and bye, ol' B'rer Rabbit will get his way.

Same as it ever was.

[Quantess]

5. K & R