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Today the Center for Popular Democracy, partnering with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Home Defenders League, released a new report, California in Crisis: How Wells Fargo’s Foreclosure Pipeline is Damaging California’s Communities.
At a press conference outside Wells Fargo’s San Francisco headquarters, homeowners, elected officials, and policy experts gathered to call on the bank to adopt common-sense reforms to avoid major harm to California’s economy in 2013.
Read the full report here and join our call for reform here.
The findings of the report are disturbing. The housing crisis remains a major cause of the economic crisis that is keeping 10 percent of Californians unemployed. Two million California homeowners are underwater and the debt is crippling the State’s economy by holding back consumer spending.
Since 2008, banks have foreclosed on approximately 1.7 million California homes. Right now, around 65,000 California homeowners are in the “foreclosure pipeline,” at risk of losing their homes. Wells Fargo is the biggest mortgage servicer in California, responsible for nearly one in five of these impending foreclosures. Our report shows that if all 11,616 Wells Fargo-serviced homes go through foreclosure, California will take a $3.3 billion hit to property values and government tax revenues.
Every month, more homes fall into the foreclosure pipeline, compounding this disaster. African-American and Latino borrowers and communities are particularly hard hit.
Californians do not have to accept this bleak future. Economists and policy experts across the political spectrum agree that widespread modification of home mortgages to current market value would prevent tens of thousands of needless foreclosures, inject billions of dollars into the economy, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and would even be in the financial interest of the investors who own the mortgages.
Wells Fargo is pivotal to determining whether principal reduction becomes a widespread solution. Recent reports show that Wells Fargo is providing far less principal reduction than Bank of America, in California, despite the fact that it services more loans.
CPD is joining our allies at ACCE, who have launched a campaign to demand that Wells Fargo let families stay in their homes. We are calling upon Wells Fargo to: (1) commit to a broad program of principal reduction, (2) be honest with Californians by reporting data on its principal reduction, short sales, and foreclosures by race, income, and zip code, and (3) immediately stop all foreclosures until the first two solutions are implemented.
We urge you to support this campaign by signing ACCE’s letter to Wells Fargo CEO John Stump - click here.
After years of predatory lending and heartless foreclosures, it is time for Wells Fargo to stop. By signing the letter, you’re sending a clear message to the bank: Stop the needless foreclosures. Stop the needless evictions. End this housing crisis.
The California in Crisis report typifies CPD’s mission of developing cutting-edge state and local policies that deliver tangible benefits to communities and building organizational infrastructure and capacity so that our partners can grow stronger and expand.
You can click here to support our work.
Today, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law two pieces of legislation that will prevent thousands of immigrant families from being torn apart by deportation. These new laws – Local Laws X and Y– stop federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using the New York Police Department (NYPD) and Department of Corrections (DOC) to deport thousands of New Yorkers.
Today’s victory builds on legislation enacted in 2011 and on years of advocacy by our partners, Make the Road New York, the Cardozo Immigrant Justice Clinic and others, to fight back against an increasingly punitive immigration enforcement regime at the federal level.
This victory also comes at a critical time, as the national policy debate is focused on the possibility of providing citizenship to millions of immigrant families. With these laws, New York City sends lawmakers in Washington a clear message that hundreds of thousands of deportations a year are bad for cities and bad for communities, and that justice requires a focus on family unity.
Thanks to the courageous leadership of New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Councilmember Melissa Mark-Viverito, the bills’ sponsors, and to supporters like you, New York City continues to be a national leader in promoting equity and inclusion for immigrant communities and working families.
CPD joined elected leaders and community partners on a national press call convened by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network about the growing number of cities and states across the country that are introducing and moving bills to limit the impact of punitive immigration enforcement policy in their communities.
Councilmember Mark-Viverito, along with elected officials from Connecticut, Massachusetts and California, spoke of the need to keep local police from contributing to a broken immigration system.
While Superstorm Sandy ravaged communities regardless of race or class, the storm exacerbated already stark inequality in New York. With thousands still without electricity, widespread mold infestations threatening the health of people in immigrant communities, and long lines for food across low-income communities, Sandy has had a particularly brutal impact on those with the least means to cope.
In the weeks following Sandy, CPD helped to bring together over 60 community organizations, labor unions, and faith groups that recognized the need for a more progressive recovery agenda to ensure the failings of the Gulf Coast and 9/11 recoveries were not repeated.
The Alliance for a Just Rebuilding (AJR) was formed to address both immediate relief and long-term rebuilding issues. CPD is proud to be playing a central coordinating role in the alliance.
In the coming months the Alliance will work to ensure that state rebuilding efforts focus on building sustainable infrastructure, protecting workers’ rights and addressing economic inequity and unemployment.
Immigration reform grabbed national headlines last week, as Congressional leaders and the White House released new principles for federal legislation. Alongside the possibility of citizenship for over 11 million, these principles included demands for heightened immigration enforcement and border security. The Center for Popular Democracy is working with partner organizations to ensure that cities and states push back against escalating demands for enforcement from the federal government. On January 25, the New York City Council held public hearings on two pieces of legislation that CPD developed along with Make the Road New York and the Cardozo Law School Immigrant Justice Clinic. The bills prohibit the Department of Corrections and the NYPD from honoring certain detainer requests issued by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), thus preventing ICE from using New York City’s criminal justice system as a platform to deport thousands of New Yorkers.
CPD’s work to organize against ICE detainers in New York has involved drafting and negotiating legislation and raising public awareness of the disastrous consequences immigration detainers have on local communities. The bills, which were developed in collaboration with the City Council, the NYPD and the Bloomberg Administration, are part of a longstanding campaign in New York City to resist the federal government’s harsh enforcement strategies and to ensure New York remains one of the country’s most immigrant-friendly cities.
New York joins dozens of cities and states across the country that are reframing the terms of the national debate on immigration away from enforcement and toward inclusion and equity. We expect both the bills to pass into law in the coming weeks.
The Progressive Caucus of the New York City Council has released a powerful 13 point vision for a progressive New York City in 2013, as the city gears up for citywide elections.
CPD played a major role helping to pull together stakeholders and draft the policy document, in consultation with leading progressive forces in NYC, including the Working Families Party and the Center for Working Families.
You can read the full report here, and sign up to support the principles here.
CPD congratulates our friends at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) for their successful advocacy to pass a statewide highway safety law, which will enable over 250,000 undocumented immigrants in Illinois to obtain drivers’ licenses – the first successful statewide effort of its kind in over a decade.
At the bill signing, ICIRR also announced the national campaign to enact federal immigration reform, which will create a road to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented immigrants nationwide.
We look forward to working with ICIRR and other partners across the country to ensure that this victory is the first step toward full equality and inclusion for immigrants across the country.
The campaign to raise New York State’s minimum wage intensified last week. Governor Cuomo is hard at work on the issue, declaring, in his recent State of the State address, his strong support for a raise. CPD is working hard, with key allies, to coordinate the campaign to raise New York’s minimum wage to $8.75 and to index it to keep up with inflation.
Over 300 workers, advocates and members of the clergy marched on the state Capitol in Albany last Tuesday to deliver a petition of 30,000 signatures.
December saw Local Progress, the new national municipal policy network, take action on cutbacks to crucial services at the local level. With the President and Congress locked in a high-stakes game of chicken over the “fiscal cliff," CPD drafted and distributed a model resolution for city councils across the nation to pass.
The motion calling on the federal government to address the fiscal crisis with progressive revenue streams rather than cuts to crucial services. Arguing that unwise cuts to federal spending inevitably shift costs onto states and municipalities, it called on Congress to focus on creating a robust economic recovery rather than rapid deficit reduction. The cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Baltimore, and Yonkers all passed resolutions with huge majorities.
These resolutions are a taste of things to come, as the Local Progress network embarks on an ambitious program of coordinated campaigns for 2013.
Last week, the County Executive of Suffolk County, Long Island signed a new Executive Order that will provide comprehensive interpretation and translation services at all county agencies for more than 120,000 limited English proficient (LEP) Long Island residents. The new language access program will ensure that all Suffolk families are able to access government services and benefits. The order also protects the confidentiality of residents’ immigration status - a policy that is critical to building trust between immigrant communities and their local government.
The Center for Popular Democracy is proud to have worked with our partners to draft the Suffolk County Language Access Executive Order and to build the campaign for equal access to government services throughout New York State.
