Project No One Leaves (PNOL) is a Boston non-profit tenants' rights organization which provides legal education to people living in foreclosed homes to enable them to understand and protect their legal rights. The group was established in 2008 by members of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau who specialized in housing law in response to a perceived spike in foreclosures and mass evictions in low-income Boston neighborhoods.
Project No One Leaves (PNOL) began in January 2008 with the establishment of a Foreclosure Task Force of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau by Harvard Law School students Nick Hartigan and David Haller. [1]
In September of that same year Project No One Leaves was formally launched, [1] with Hartigan and Haller being joined by Tony Borich, another Harvard student affiliated with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, the oldest student-run legal aid organization in the United States. [2] The trio were concerned about an uptick in foreclosures and evictions meted out against low-income Bostonians due to the subprime mortgage crisis and set out to inform the occupants of foreclosed homes of their legal rights under the state laws of Massachusetts. [2]
Project No One Leaves makes use of newly filed foreclosures in the area to create a database of affected residences. [2] Residents are then contacted in person by volunteers with the project, which include students at Harvard Law School and eight other Boston-area law schools and colleges, [2] as well as undergraduates and members of concerned community groups. In 2009, more than 1,000 people living in foreclosed properties were contacted by Project No One Leaves and informed of their legal rights, with a view to helping keep victims of foreclosure in their own homes. [2]
Canvassers encourage residents to attend meetings of City Life/Vida Urbana to meet others in similar straits and help interested individuals to make contact with Harvard Legal Aid's Foreclosure Task Force and other legal aid organizations. [3] This grassroots contact enables legal action to be taken against those mortgage-holders who are in violation of the law. Law students have won a series of cash settlements by those banks which have failed to keep the properties they hold in satisfactory condition for habitation. [2]
Working together, Project No One Leaves volunteers, City Life community organizers, and other groups work to pressure banks holding foreclosed properties to resell the assets to community lender Boston Community Capital (BCC), which mortgages or sometimes rents them to the original occupants at the current deflated market rate. [4] BCC makes its money by charging a 25 percent premium on its purchase price. [5] Residents are thus allowed to stay in their current dwelling on a more affordable fixed-rate mortgage, while banks are able to expeditiously turn over their foreclosed properties for somewhat more than they would typically expect. [5]
In the 13 months between May 2010 and June 2011, BCC purchased a total of 55 properties containing a total of 125 residential units. [5] Plans are in place for the future purchase and resale of hundreds of more homes, primarily in working class areas of Boston. [5]
Over its first three years of its existence, Project No One Leaves has grown, with additional chapters sprouting in Boston and elsewhere in the United States, including Miami. [6]
In November 2010, Project No One Leaves organized a national conference in which lawyers and community organizers from 15 states came to Boston to learn about the foreclosure resistance model espoused by the organization. [7]
The joint activities of Project No One Leaves and City Life have attracted national attention via the PBS News Hour, [8] the New York Times, [4] National Public Radio, [9] and the Huffington Post. [10]
Project No One Leaves has also received recognition from national housing organizations, such as the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. [11]
In April 2009 Project No One Leaves founders Dave Haller and Nick Hartigan received the Outstanding Student Award from the Clinical Legal Education Association in recognition of their excellence in clinical legal work. [1]
Project No One Leaves and Boston Community Capital saw their national stature further elevated in April 2010 when chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke cited their efforts as an example of how "local communities are meeting the challenges of tough times" in a public speech. [5]
A mortgage is a legal instrument of the common law which is used to create a security interest in real property held by a lender as a security for a debt, usually a mortgage loan. Hypothec is the corresponding term in civil law jurisdictions, albeit with a wider sense, as it also covers non-possessory lien.
Foreclosure is a legal process in which a lender attempts to recover the balance of a loan from a borrower who has stopped making payments to the lender by forcing the sale of the asset used as the collateral for the loan.
In finance, a security interest is a legal right granted by a debtor to a creditor over the debtor's property which enables the creditor to have recourse to the property if the debtor defaults in making payment or otherwise performing the secured obligations. One of the most common examples of a security interest is a mortgage: a person borrows money from the bank to buy a house, and they grant a mortgage over the house so that if they default in repaying the loan, the bank can sell the house and apply the proceeds to the outstanding loan.
Equity stripping, also known as equity skimming, is a type of foreclosure rescue scheme. Often considered a form of predatory lending, equity stripping became increasingly widespread in the early 2000s. In an equity stripping scheme an investor buys the property from a homeowner facing foreclosure and agrees to lease the home to the homeowner who may remain in the home as a tenant. Often, these transactions take advantage of uninformed, low-income homeowners; because of the complexity of the transaction, victims are often unaware that they are giving away their property and equity. Several states have taken steps to confront the more unscrupulous practices of equity stripping. Although "foreclosure re-conveyance" schemes can be beneficial and ethically conducted in some circumstances, many times the practice relies on fraud and egregious or unmeetable terms.
Real estate owned, or REO, is a term used in the United States to describe a class of property owned by a lender—typically a bank, government agency, or government loan insurer—after an unsuccessful sale at a foreclosure auction. A foreclosing beneficiary will typically set the opening bid at such an auction for at least the outstanding loan amount. If there are no interested bidders, then the beneficiary will legally repossess the property. This is commonly the case when the amount owed on the home is higher than the current market value of the foreclosure property, such as with a mortgage loan made at a high loan-to-value during a real estate bubble. As soon as the beneficiary repossesses the property it is listed on their books as REO and categorized as an asset..
A mortgage loan or simply mortgage, in civil law jurisdictions known also as a hypothec loan, is a loan used either by purchasers of real property to raise funds to buy real estate, or by existing property owners to raise funds for any purpose while putting a lien on the property being mortgaged. The loan is "secured" on the borrower's property through a process known as mortgage origination. This means that a legal mechanism is put into place which allows the lender to take possession and sell the secured property to pay off the loan in the event the borrower defaults on the loan or otherwise fails to abide by its terms. The word mortgage is derived from a Law French term used in Britain in the Middle Ages meaning "death pledge" and refers to the pledge ending (dying) when either the obligation is fulfilled or the property is taken through foreclosure. A mortgage can also be described as "a borrower giving consideration in the form of a collateral for a benefit (loan)".
Mortgage discrimination or mortgage lending discrimination is the practice of banks, governments or other lending institutions denying loans to one or more groups of people primarily on the basis of race, ethnic origin, sex or religion.
City Life/Vida Urbana commonly known as "City Life," is a social justice group in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1973, a group of local residents and activists with roots in the civil rights, feminist and anti-Vietnam War movements founded the Jamaica Plain Tenants Action Group, now City Life/Vida Urbana. Since 2008, City Life has focused on preventing evictions of both former owners and renters resulting from a rise in foreclosures. City Life/Vida Urbana is currently based in Jamaica Plain, with satellite memberships in East Boston, Brockton, Lynn, Quincy, and Worcester.
This article is a subordinate article to the subprime mortgage crisis. It covers some of the miscellaneous effects of the crisis in more detail, to preserve the flow of the main page.
The 2010 United States foreclosure crisis, sometimes referred to as Foreclosure-gate or Foreclosuregate, refers to a widespread epidemic of improper foreclosures initiated by large banks and other lenders. The foreclosure crisis was extensively covered by news outlets beginning in October 2010, and several large banks—including Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup—responded by halting their foreclosure proceedings temporarily in some or all states. The foreclosure crisis caused significant investor fear in the U.S. A 2014 study published in the American Journal of Public Health linked the foreclosure crisis to an increase in suicide rates.
Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS) is an American privately held corporation. MERS is a separate and distinct corporation that serves as a nominee on mortgages after the turn of the century and is owned by holding company MERSCORP Holdings, Inc., which owns and operates an electronic registry known as the MERS system, which is designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgages in the United States. According to the Department of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, MERS is an agent for lenders without any reference to MERS as a principal. On October 5, 2018, Intercontinental Exchange and MERS announced that ICE had acquired all of MERS.
A strategic default is the decision by a borrower to stop making payments on a debt, despite having the financial ability to make the payments.
A mortgage servicer is a company to which some borrowers pay their mortgage loan payments and which performs other services in connection with mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. The mortgage servicer may be the entity that originated the mortgage, or it may have purchased the mortgage servicing rights from the original mortgage lender. The duties of a mortgage servicer vary, but typically include the acceptance and recording of mortgage payments; calculating variable interest rates on adjustable rate loans; payment of taxes and insurance from borrower escrow accounts; negotiations of workouts and modifications of mortgage upon default; and conducting or supervising the foreclosure process when necessary.
The National Community Stabilization Trust is a Washington, D.C.–based non-profit organization that facilitates the transfer of foreclosed and abandoned properties from financial institutions nationwide to local housing organizations to promote property reuse and neighborhood stability. According to U.S. Banker, the Stabilization Trust was "created to act as a middleman between cities looking to acquire abandoned properties and the lenders looking to unload them."
In the United States, squatting occurs when a person enters land that does not belong to them without lawful permission and proceeds to act in the manner of an owner. Historically, squatting occurred during the settlement of the Midwest when colonial European settlers established land rights and during the California Gold Rush. There was squatting during the Great Depression in Hoovervilles and also during World War II. Shanty towns returned to the US after the Great Recession (2007–2009) and in the 2010s, there were increasing numbers of people occupying foreclosed homes using fraudulent documents. In some cases, a squatter may be able to obtain ownership of property through adverse possession.
A bank walkaway is a decision by a mortgage lender to not foreclose on a defaulted mortgage, or to not complete foreclosure proceedings. These are sometimes referred to as abandoned foreclosures or stalled foreclosures, though this latter term is also used more broadly when the foreclosure process has stalled for other reasons.
Frank Spruill Alexander is an American legal scholar, serving as the Sam Nunn Professor of Law at the Emory University School of Law. He is also General Counsel for Center for Community Progress.
Occupy Homes or Occupy Our Homes is part of the Occupy movement which attempts to prevent the foreclosure of people's homes. Protesters delay foreclosures by camping out on the foreclosed property. They also stage protests at the banks responsible for the ongoing foreclosure crisis, sometimes blocking their entrances. It has been compared to the direct action taken by people to prevent home foreclosures during the Great Depression in the United States.
The Making Home Affordable program of the United States Treasury was launched in 2009 as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The main activity under MHA is the Home Affordable Modification Program.
Elyse Cherry is the chief executive of BlueHub Capital, a community development financial institution. She is known for her work in community development, affordable housing, and LGBTQ activism.
