Listen to an audio story by Annenberg Radio News
A small crowd of residents and community organizers gathered outside a dilapidated home in Watts today.
The windows are boarded up. A chain link fence surrounds the wildly overgrown yard. The sign in front reads: private property–do not enter. This is just another foreclosed home, an all-too familiar sight in watts–and a sign that the financial crisis has hit some communities harder than others.
“I lost my home. It was sold on August 15th and it was because I had been trying to get Bank of America to work with us on a modification and they didn’t want to work with us,” said Juana Quintanilla, through a translator.
Quintanilla is one of the more than 59,000 households in California that received a foreclosure notice last month.
Members of the community, led by the Alliance of Californians for Community Cmpowerment (ACCE) are speaking out against the harm of foreclosures.
They think the banks should take responsibility, blaming CEOs from banks like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo for predatory lending practices.
“We’re tired of our neighborhoods. Cities and states paying the price. It’s time for wall street banks to pay for the mess that they’ve created,” said Lyneva Mottley, an ACCE organizer in Watts.
A Wells Fargo representative responded today. “We work hard to keep borrowers in their homes when they encounter difficulties and view foreclosures as a measure of last resort,” said Jim Hines in an email.
The California Reinvestment Coalition released a report today that estimates that the costs of foreclosures in Los Angeles since 2008 is nearly $80 billion – in home values, property tax revenue, and the cost of maintaining foreclosed properties.
California has the second highest foreclosure rate in the country and the numbers keep climbing.
200,000 homes in Los Angeles County have been foreclosed since the start of the foreclosure epidemic in 2008.
ACCE organized a neighborhood campaign called “Refund and Rebuild California.”
The crowd walked the neighborhood in Watts today, already punctuated with foreclosure signs, asking neighbors for support.
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