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Redefining Baltimoron: City Council says it’s okay to not pay your mortgage for a year
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Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke
Perhaps you’ve read the little bio paragraph that accompanies my photo on this page. In it, I (not jokingly) refer to the banning of common sense here in the no-longer “Free State” of Maryland.
When a legislative body passes a law that keeps kids in car seats until they’re eight-years-old, the group has officially lost its collective mind.
Unfortunately, illogical thought is not limited to our State House in Annapolis.
Yesterday the Baltimore City Council – specifically democrat council members Mary Pat Clarke and Bill Henry – introduced legislation that would help keep foreclosed homeowners in their residence for up to a year after an eviction notice has been served.
The legislation – quaintly entitled “buying time” – is aimed to lengthen the current 14 days notice between foreclosure and eviction because two weeks is simply not enough time for the homeowner to react to save their dwelling.
Unmentioned is the annoying little pearl that these delinquent debtors probably had three or four (or more) months full of opportunities to contact the lender and stave off the eviction.
Enter ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), that fine, upstanding organization currently under scrutiny for questionable voter registration, owing of back taxes, embezzlement issues and for the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.
Just foolin’ with that last one.
In Baltimore, ACORN organizers are doing all they can to help keep evicted homeowners in their houses – including breaking the law.
Last week, a self-proclaimed ACORN “foreclosure fighter” used bolt cutters (please see the video below) to remove a padlock from the front door of a home that had been seized by the Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank.
After committing the crime on behalf of a foreclosure “victim,” the activist proudly exclaimed “This is our house now,” and then took a couple of days to wander down to the police station to turn himself in on fourth degree burglary charges.
ACORN may call this action “homesteading,” but the city of Baltimore – for now – still calls it breaking and entering.
But I digress: Councilwoman Clarke actually mustered the enormous veggies necessary to tell WBAL Radio that, “The best families to buy a house are the ones who live there and tried to buy it and were allowed to take a mortgage beyond their means. That was not their decision, that was the decision of lenders.”
According to Clarke and Kelly, all of these defaulting homeowners are victims of big, bad predatory lenders.
Granted, many purchasers of property in Baltimore are no doubt products of the city’s public school system, so the victimization could stem from not being able to spell cat without being spotted the ‘c’ and the ‘a’.
The former owner of the aforementioned ACORN property crime bought the two-story rowhouse in 2001 for $87,000, and obviously didn’t encounter any difficulty understanding the realtor contract.
But when the bank foreclosed in 2006 with the property owner owing more than $260,000, she was obviously goaded into a refinancing she couldn’t afford.
If the Baltimore City Council has its way, future accomplises to ACORN property crimes may get to live mortgage free for more than a year.
Now that’s a stimulus my personal finances would certainly welcome.
By the way, that common sense thing? Eleven of the 14 city council members have come out in support of this legislation.
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