Florida’s foreclosure factory is a mess
Posted on September 7th, 2010
- Big business for a few lawyers
- Tiny tragediesfor many Floridians
- When did we ever talk of 850 foreclosures in a single State, every day?
These days America sometimes is awash with depressing news about foreclosures, and it is as if the flotsam that followed the tidal wave will be with us forever. The Courts are not coping with the backlog, while human rights monitors caution about tactics employed by lawyers and the nation’s justice system to bulldoze a way through the mess.
In the process, a new breed of Ferrari-owning foreclosure kings has emerged in what was previously a boring part of America’s legal system. Big guns in the nation’s corporate environment like to deal with similarly sized firms because their styles and values frequently match. The same applies to our mortgage lending industry – here heavyweights like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae retain the services of vast foreclosure factories whose assembly lines push cases through as though they were shredding cabbages, not people’s dreams.
Leading newspapers have been focusing on these shady characters lately, and a few have even had their knuckles rapped by overworked judges trying to maintain standards. Sadly, very sadly many of these perversions of America’s hitherto fine justice system go unnoticed, as legal predators push aside the rights of yet another American who has already given up already.
Florida’s judicial system is in a mess. I say this, not because of the caliber of the retired judges brought back to staff the special foreclosure courts, but because the sheer volume of the work insults our dream of an America where every man and woman shall have equal rights. Take any Court Day at random in a place like Broward County, which some refer to as the epicenter of boom and bust. Uncontested cases often overflow into a passage lobby on the 5th floor – there judges, attorneys and court staffers sometimes hammer out decisions in the way that children endlessly repeat a nonsense nursery rhyme.
I would have thought that America could have found the time to at least deal with these personal tragedies in a more humane manner than simply trashing cherished rights to a home to call your own. Many legal experts share my concerns that this fast-tracked foreclosure mill is so efficient that some Americans are losing their homes unnecessarily. A foreclosure defense attorney told me “The judges are so swamped with this stuff that they just don't pay attention. They just rubber-stamp them." Others are more direct. "They're too … old to understand what's going on," another very frustrated lawyer told me. "It's the truth."
Meantime the foreclosures factories rumble on. When last I looked, the Florida backlog stood at 500,000. They plan to clear 62% of that in the next 12 months – if they worked 365 days a year they would still need to clear around 850 a day. News by www.foreclosureconnections.com.
Filed under Foreclosure News |
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