Detroit, Michigan
In far Northwest Detroit, Bertha and William Garrett paid off their first mortgage—a $40,000 loan—in full. In 1998, they took out a second mortgage for $45,000 from a company called Conti Mortgage and Lender.
“They told me that I needed to invest in the equity of my home, and that an adjustable-rate mortgage would set me up for investments,” said Bertha. It was a common ploy that mortgage pushers used in the late 1990s: Call up someone—often an older woman—who wouldn’t necessarily take out a loan and tell her all about how her money was just sitting there, wasting away, when it could be used to better her family’s future. Bertha and William had children in college and ministry school, and an extra year’s worth of tuition sounded like a good idea.
Bertha agreed to the loan, which Conti quickly resold to Bank of New York Mellon. But instead of setting Bertha up to make smart investments, the predatory loan plunged her into debt as $45,000 ballooned to a staggering $190,000.
Predatory mortgages existed long before the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the 1950s and 1960s, they were common in the redlined urban neighborhoods where major banks and the federal government refused to extend loans, opening a secondary market for exploitive mortgage pushers, then called loan sharks. After decades of organizing, including massive mortgage loan strikes in Chicago, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which ended redlining and essentially destroyed the loan sharks’ market.
But predatory mortgages didn’t disappear. Instead, as Reagan deregulated the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, and Clinton deregulated the banking industry in the 1990s, predatory mortgage pushers were no longer confined to minority neighborhoods where there was no oversight or access to federal funds. Instead, mortgage pushers began targeting whites as well as people of color. As a team of housing scholars wrote in American Quarterly, “The predatory exploitation of the urban core has gone mainstream.”78
But even though financial exploitation had become more widespread nationally, predatory mortgage pushers still primarily targeted African Americans and Latinos. According to the Center for Responsible Lending:
Loan type and race and ethnicity are strongly linked. African Americans and Latinos were much more likely to receive high interest rate (subprime) loans and loans with features that are associated with higher foreclosures, specifically prepayment penalties and hybrid or option ARMs [adjustable-rate mortgages]. These disparities were evident even comparing borrowers within the same credit score ranges. In fact, the disparities were especially pronounced for borrowers with higher credit scores. For example, among borrowers with a FICO score of over 660 (indicating good credit), African Americans and Latinos received a high interest rate loan more than three times as often as white borrowers.79
The Center for Responsible Lending called this disparity a “dual mortgage market,” in which families of color had to navigate mortgage pushers’ predatory track, while white families were offered conventional mortgages. The racial difference in who was allowed to buy what type of mortgage was so stark that the word “subprime” (the industry’s term for predatory loans) became “a demographic category as much as a financial definition.”80
Affidavits by two of Wells Fargo’s most successful mortgage sellers reveal just how aggressively the industry targeted African Americans specifically for these predatory mortgages. In sworn testimonies in 2009, Elizabeth Jacobson and Tony Pascal, who both worked in Wells Fargo’s Baltimore branch, explained the myriad ways the company institutionalized racist practices. According to Pascal, the predatory lending division intentionally sent out promotional material to the city’s zip codes with the highest percentage of African American residents. These packets, Pascal explained, could be printed in multiple so-called languages, one of which was “African American.” (He brought with him to court a computer screenshot proving that the company’s computer system offered this language option, perhaps anticipating disbelief.)
Jacobson explained that the company specifically targeted African American churches for predatory loans, and that it went out of its way to make sure African Americans were the face of the company in these settings. Jacobson, who is white, was barred from giving presentations to African American congregations, instead hiring an African American saleswoman to focus exclusively on selling these toxic products to the churches. Loan sellers never, meanwhile, gave presentations aimed at selling predatory loans to white congregations.
“Subprime loan officers did not market or target white churches for subprime loans,” she testified. “When it came to marketing, any reference to ‘church’ or ‘churches’ was understood as code for African-American or black churches.”81
Wells Fargo and all other major mortgage pushing companies financially incentivized loan salesmen to steer people into predatory mortgages. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the nation’s largest mortgage companies used a two-tier system to guide a borrower towards a mortgage loan. Here’s how it worked. First, the company used algorithms to calculate what loan a person qualified for based on his or her credit scores. The better the person’s credit rating, the lower the interest rate and the smaller the fees. The system compiled these interest rates and fees into a rate sheet, which was sent to the loan salesman but not shown to the borrower. Here’s where it got tricky. The salesman was allowed to change the terms of the loans (such as raising the interest rate or tacking on fees), and he got paid more if he was able to charge the borrower above the rate sheet’s price.82
This pay structure incentivized loan salesmen to trick their African American customers into riskier and more expensive loans—even if they qualified for a “prime” mortgage.
As Pascal explained:
Because Wells Fargo made a higher profit on subprime loans, the company put “bounties” on minority borrowers. By this I mean that loan officers received cash incentives to aggressively market subprime loans in minority communities. If a loan officer referred a borrower who should have qualified for a prime loan to a subprime loan, the loan officer would receive a bonus. Loan officers were able to do this because they had the discretion to decide which loan products to offer and to determine the interest rate and fees charged to the borrower. Since loan officers made more money when they charged higher interest rates and fees to borrowers, there was a great financial incentive to put as many minority borrowers as possible into subprime loans and to charge these borrowers higher rates and fees.
These types of perverse financial incentives—such as placing a “bounty” on African American lenders—created a racist internal culture. Pascal testified that he often heard other predatory loan salesmen “mimic and make fun of their minority customers by using racial slurs. They referred to subprime loans made in minority communities as ‘ghetto loans.’ ” As for the customers themselves, Pascal’s colleagues called them “mud people,” while his branch manager openly called them “niggers.”83
In the California Law Review, scholar Benjamin Howell explains how predatory lending perpetrated by the largest Wall Street banks during the 1990s and 2000s took advantage of the history of housing discrimination, targeting redlined neighborhoods because they knew the demand for mortgages was high.
“Where lending discrimination once took a binary form—bigoted loan officers rejecting loan applicants because of their skin color—the new model of discrimination is exploitation,” writes Howell. “Unscrupulous lenders now prey on a history of racial redlining by aggressively marketing overpriced loan products with onerous terms in the same neighborhoods where mainstream lenders once refused to lend.”84
Since 2008, three of the nation’s largest banks—Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and SunTrust Bank—have settled with the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of widespread and institutional lending discrimination.
But as Bertha watched her mortgage payments balloon in the early 2000s, she didn’t know anything about discrimination and predatory lending. All she knew was that her debt was spiraling out of control. Bertha and William turned to their daughter, Michelle, for help. In 2003, she and her husband bought the house from her parents and negotiated the total debt down to $125,000. Briefly, their monthly payments were only $900, but they soon increased to $1,100, then $1,300.
Money wasn’t, however, the biggest challenge in Bertha’s life. William had fallen ill, and he suffered a series of strokes. After the first, brain hemorrhaging left him frequently disoriented, and he began wandering around the neighborhood like a lost child. Later, after his second stroke and cataract surgery, he was rendered legally blind. Bertha was grateful to live on a close-knit block; her neighbors promised to keep an eye on William when he ventured outside.
William could barely see any longer, so he closed his barbershop, cutting off his and Bertha’s only source of income. Bertha applied for a loan modification, hoping that this one would decrease the payments. Instead, they rose to $1,650 a month. The two families split the monthly payments, Bertha and William selling land and furniture to scrape together $1,000 a month, and Michelle and her husband covering the rest, in addition to their own mortgage payments.
But that arrangement didn’t last long. One night as Michelle watched the evening news, she learned that the restaurant franchise where she worked had gone out of business. She had been laid off—and no one even bothered to tell her. Some of her co-workers who hadn’t caught the news segment arrived for work only to find the doors locked. The mortgage payments jumped to $2,500 a month. The bank kept selling the mortgage note from one servicer to the next; Bertha could barely keep up with where she should send the checks. For five months, the two families scraped together $2,500. Then, finally, they could no longer pay.
“Lord, I am sinking,” Bertha scrawled in tight handwriting in one of her many notebooks filled with poems and gospel songs.
“My husband is blind, we are without money and have no way to pay.”
Just before Christmas in 2010, Bertha found a notice of foreclosure posted on her front door.
For many families, realizing that their home may no longer be theirs is the worst moment of their lives.
Monique White, a mother in North Minneapolis, recalls learning that her home had been sold in an auction without U.S. Bank, the owner of her mortgage, even telling her.
“I went to turn on the heat and my furnace wasn’t working,” she said. “I called the company to come out and check the gas, but they said they couldn’t, because I wasn’t the homeowner. . . . I was devastated . . . I was just bawling.” It was the middle of January and White had young children, so she turned on the oven to heat her home as she tried to figure out what to do.
The shame of foreclosure is so great, sometimes the fact that people will know about it seems worse than losing the house itself.
“I didn’t even want my family to know,” remembers Connie Freeman, another Minneapolis resident. When her husband, Mark, attended a union rally protesting foreclosures and one of his colleagues convinced him to speak, Connie was devastated that a whole crowd of people now knew their secret.
“I was almost hysterical,” she said.
This silence reinforces the sense of isolation, but breaking the silence is not easy. In a nation where private property and legal contracts have become valued more than anything, the idea of default is terrifying.
Steve and Pamela Douglass, a couple in rural Minnesota, remember the moment they realized that they couldn’t pay both their mortgage and their medical bills.
“In 2010 I went to HUD [for help] and filled out all the paperwork,” Pamela Douglass said. “And that just made me sick because I realized that I didn’t have anywhere near enough money to pay these bills.”
Their lawyer advised them to default on their mortgage, but when the end of the month arrived, the two were frantic.
“We were just bawling and fighting and screaming at each other because we do not not pay our bills,” said Douglass.
Others are not able to endure these feelings of shame and desperation. There are no national statistics, but the rising trend of foreclosure-related suicides is obvious from the horror stories plastered across the front page of local newspapers. In Taunton, Massachusetts, a woman named Carlene Balderrama awoke on the morning of her home’s foreclosure in July 2008, faxed her last note to her mortgage lender, PHH Mortgage Corp., and then shot herself with her husband’s rifle. The note read: “By the time you foreclose on my house, I’ll be dead.”85 In March 2012, a man shot himself and another woman hanged herself after their Philadelphia homes were foreclosed on and sold at sheriff’s sales. The woman, Lynda Clark, lived alone on Philadelphia’s South Side, and her hanging body was discovered by the sheriff deputies tasked with posting the eviction notice on her door.86 A ninety-year-old woman in Akron, Ohio, shot herself in the chest in October 2008 when the police arrived at the door of the home she had lived in for thirty-eight years.87
Like foreclosures themselves, these suicides are creeping into tiny towns and bustling cities in all corners of the country. Homeowners have either shot themselves or burned to death, often with family members, in puritanical Stamford, Connecticut (settled in 1641); pastoral Ocala, Florida (1:7 horse to human ratio countywide88); stately Roswell, Georgia (manufacturer of the Confederate soldiers’ “Roswell gray” uniforms); booming Houston, Texas (home of the world’s largest livestock show and rodeo); and various cities across the Golden State of California (Los Angeles, Newbury Park, and Santee, to name just a few).89 According to one count, foreclosure and other devastations wrought by the economic crisis have caused more than two hundred people to kill themselves, and sometimes their family members, since 2008.90 As journalist Nick Turse wrote that same year, “Wall Street’s financial meltdown is beginning to be measured not only in dollars and cents, but also in blood. Without debt- or mortgage-forgiveness, more casualties are sure to come.”91
This suicidal feeling of shame is one of the financial industry’s most powerful products, backed by centuries of literature, art, architecture, sermons, advertisements, and propaganda that have advanced the social doctrine that a home demonstrates not only a family’s economic worth and class position, but also its moral value. This ideology reinforces the twisted view that well-painted shutters and white picket fences signify a winner’s dedication and hard work, and a foreclosure sign denotes a loser’s failure.
The argument is particularly dangerous considering the racism embedded in predatory home mortgages. Given the well-documented discrimination, is viewing foreclosure as a mark of poor character that far from the more overt bigotry of seeing race as the indicator of inferiority? Perhaps it’s closer than most would like to admit, but the symbolism of foreclosure is one that few take the time to fully analyze—until they have to.
Like so many others, Bertha kept the foreclosure a secret from almost everyone in her life. She couldn’t tell her husband. His health was worsening; he was cycling in and out of the hospital. When he was home, he would sometimes trip and fall. Other times he would wander around the neighborhood.
“My fear was that I would lose my husband. I saw him standing outside one day, and I thought to myself: They would have to drag him out of here,” said Bertha. “I couldn’t tell my husband we wouldn’t have Thanksgiving in the house and that we could be evicted.” After so much of her life had been devoted to making a safe home for William and their children, she couldn’t imagine not protecting him now.
Bertha’s baby girl, Alisha, was another person Bertha kept from knowing about the foreclosure. The girl wanted to be just like her older siblings, whose backyard weddings she’d attended when she was young.
“Momma, I want to get married in this yard,” she often told her mother.
Bertha felt paralyzed.
“I just rocked in the chair, and I wanted to scream,” she remembers.
The Garretts were far from the only family in their neighborhood whose house was in jeopardy. Bertha’s next-door neighbor was also is foreclosure. Bertha didn’t know, even though she visited the bedridden woman a few times a week to deliver cooked dinners. The family across the street was in foreclosure, too.
In fact, the landscape of this entire Detroit neighborhood was quietly turning to patchwork as the banks forced family after family out of their homes.
“Five years ago, people were in all these houses,” said Mike Shane, an organizer with Moratorium Now! who lives only a few streets away from Bertha’s home. “Now it’s a completely different area. It’s just been wiped out,” he said.
Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit lost a quarter of a million residents. This exodus encompassed a full 25 percent of the city’s population, the largest percentage loss in the city’s history. Detroit’s population has been declining since the 1950s, when it was the fourth-largest city in the United States. But this last decade’s wave of depopulation was entirely different, because it wasn’t voluntary.
Through a foreclosure process tainted with racism, banks forced—and continue to force—hundreds of thousands of people out of Detroit, many of whom, like the Garretts, wanted to stay. As housing lawyer Jerry Goldberg writes, “Not one of the many newspaper articles discussing this lost population puts the blame where it belongs—on the major banks, which have leveled neighborhoods throughout Detroit with mass foreclosures driven by racist, predatory lending.”92
From 2000 to 2012, banks foreclosed on more than a hundred thousand homes in Detroit.93 At times, the rate of eviction was so high that the city hired additional contract workers—whom residents dubbed “Blackwater bailiffs”—to keep pace. One of the main causes of foreclosure was the extremely high number of predatory mortgages in this majority African American city. Between 2004 and 2006, 73 percent of the new mortgages in the city were predatory loans, compared to about 20 percent nationally.94
Perhaps nothing proves the forced nature of this exodus out of Detroit better than the handful of desperate people who have brandished weapons in standoffs with the eviction bailiffs. Only a few blocks from Bertha’s house, an armed man barricaded himself in his house in 2012 in a futile attempt to stop his eviction. A few years earlier, a man in the Detroit suburb of Allen Park was shot and killed by a SWAT team when he tried to defend his home from being repossessed. Bertha was a peaceful woman, but she understood the collective feeling of desperation.
“We are fighting for a city that so many have already declared abandoned,” Bertha said.
In executing a forced repopulation of a quarter of Detroit’s residents, profit-obsessed bankers are quietly waging an economic war against the government of Detroit and its people. The rumors about $1 houses may be exaggerated, but the sharp decline in home prices combined with ballooning mortgage principals have indeed created a Kafkaesque financial market. Down the street from the Garretts, a house sold outright for $3,500 while Bertha was making $2,500 mortgage payments every month. Across the street, a neighbor owed $140,000 on a house that was appraised at $9,800—almost fifteen times less than what he owed. The authority of Wall Street and the financial markets crumbled as families realized that they somehow owed up to twenty times what their homes were worth.
Property devaluations occur because each additional foreclosure drags down the value of surrounding homes, pushing the neighbors further underwater on their mortgages and increasing the likelihood that they, too, will default. Even the International Monetary Fund, an organization best known for its dogmatic adherence to “free-market” capitalism, admits the danger of these property value spirals on the surrounding community’s economy.
“The associated negative price effects in turn reduce economic activity through a number of self-reinforcing contractionary spirals,” the report stated. “Such externalities—banks and households ignoring the social cost of defaults and fire sales—may justify policy intervention aimed at stopping household defaults, foreclosures, and fire sales.”95
When property values and the number of residents plummet, the effect is a massive erosion of the tax base. Every single foreclosure costs the government approximately $2,000 in lost property tax revenue, according to an analysis of foreclosures in California.96 Additionally, local city governments are forced to carry out the evictions and absorb other foreclosure-related costs, which average just over $19,000 per house.97 Foreclosures in the Detroit metro area, therefore, have cost the local government $220 million in lost property tax revenue and as much as $2 billion in government-absorbed foreclosure costs.98
These types of bank-imposed debts have pushed Detroit’s local government to the brink of collapse, making it nearly impossible for the city to fund even the most necessary services like public schools and police and fire departments. Throughout 2012 and 2013, the budget crisis was so acute that the state repeatedly threatened to take over the city’s operations and finances through Michigan’s emergency financial manager law. Finally, on March 1, 2013, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder announced the largest state takeover of a U.S. city in the nation’s history, appointing a single man, Kevyn D. Orr, to take control of the entire city government of Detroit. As the New York Times wrote, “the emergency-manager law gives Mr. Orr extraordinary powers to reshape the city,” including the right to sell off parts of the city, break union contracts and fire local elected officials.99
The imposition of the emergency manager sparked protests and outcry across Detroit, particularly given the increasingly racialized use of takeovers across the state. After Detroit’s takeover, six mostly black cities were being controlled by emergency managers, meaning that nearly half of all African Americans living in Michigan were under the jurisdiction of unelected officials.
“It is the civil rights issue of our time,” Reverend Wendell Anthony, pastor of the Fellowship Chapel in Detroit, told The Washington Post. “I didn’t vote for an emergency manager. I voted for a mayor. I did not give up my right to vote on the whims and fancies of a law that we believe is unconstitutional and immoral… We view it as another step in the direction of voter suppression and vote oppression.”100
Reverend David Bullock, pastor of the Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church, explained that the implications of Michigan’s emergency manager law go far beyond the temporary issue of local city council meetings. It’s about using the city’s financial insecurity to impose a form of martial economics—one that could easily be replicated in cities and towns across the country.
“The real security question for rich people is financial security,” he said. “It’s no longer ’68 and ’69—the hot riot summers. They are no longer worried about physical security. They are worried about their money.”
When it comes to Wall Street, Bullock is right. Despite the emergency manager’s nearly unrivaled power, there is one contract that Orr can’t break: Detroit’s annual $600 million interest payments to Wall Street banks.
The city’s landscape is testimony to the systemic effects of mass eviction and the defunding—and resulting disenfranchisement—of local government. On the East Side of the city, entire square miles are fully vacant except for the occasional deer or fox scampering through the shells of old industrial plants. Overhead, lazy blimps advertise scrap metal to no one. One sign, erected on Eight Mile Road, reads: warning! this city is infested by crackheads. secure your belongings and pray for your life. your legislators won’t protect you.101
Across the top of a vacant factory closer to downtown is another message: destroy what destroys you—a Detroit adaptation of Langston Hughes’s famed description of capitalism: “dog eat dog.”102
Even in the West Side’s semi-populated neighborhoods like the Garretts’, charred houses with twisted metal roofs are remnants of recent “devil’s nights” when residents torched hundreds of vacant homes. In April 2012, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing admitted that the city didn’t have the money to combat arson in vacant properties and proposed letting the houses burn as long as the wind was right. The firefighter’s union subsequently sued the city for negligence due to budget cuts and firehouse closures. The police officer’s association has issued a warning that the department could not adequately protect the city’s citizens under the strapped conditions. So many bus lines have been cut that there is always a constant stream of people walking on the sidewalk along major thoroughfares. The average high school classroom size is sixty students.103
“Detroit puts a human face on what is an abstract matter of property rights,” said Steve Babson, a professor at Wayne State College in Michigan. “It’s highly ironic when people talk about the sanctity of contracts when our understanding of contracts is so greatly flawed. This is holding sacrosanct the bank contract over all others. It’s a question of whose contracts do we value?” he said.
These systemic effects of foreclosure complicate the issue of mortgage contracts. Yes, the individual houses functioned as collateral for the loans, but the survival of the neighborhoods and local city governments did not. Detroit is far from the only place on the verge of bankruptcy as a result of widespread foreclosure. Stockton, California; Central Falls, Rhode Island; and San Bernardino, California, have already declared bankruptcy under the financial weight of massive foreclosures. In San Bernandino, the local government has toyed with the idea of using eminent domain to seize mortgages in an effort to curb the never-ending downward spiral.
“It’s the same pattern everywhere,” said housing lawyer Jerry Goldberg. “It’s just more extreme here.”
Perhaps the question, then, is not whether the banks had the right to assert their individual contracts through mortgage loan repossessions, but whether they had the right to break the broader social contract through physical evictions, which cause the majority of the governmental costs and systemic issues. Housing activists and senators alike have argued for the “right to rent,” which would allow families who have defaulted on their mortgages to stay in their homes and pay monthly rent. Others argue for a greater nullification of the mortgage contracts entirely, pointing to the precedent of canceling property contracts in the name of the public welfare. In the 1930s, as the Great Depression set in, twenty-seven states enacted foreclosure moratoriums, breaking the mortgage contracts to forestall a national emergency. Yet in 2013, Michigan’s approach to a similar emergency was to nullify the nation’s democratic contract, stripping any local electoral power away from nearly half of the state’s African American population.
Bertha hired a lawyer, a “sweet man,” as she describes him, to try to fight the foreclosure in court. However, because the current legal process fails to account for the systemic effects of foreclosure, there were few strategies he could bring to her defense. Bank of New York Mellon repossessed the house, and then—in the absence of buyers at the auction sale—bought it back for $12,000. That was when the lawyer told Bertha that she had to understand the reality of the situation: She’d lost her home.
At that time, a lot of people were telling Bertha the same thing. But she’d started to see the situation differently. She began thinking about a moral law, a higher law, one that surpassed lawyers and eviction notices.
“Mine was a faith-based thinking,” said Bertha. “When I prayed, I could feel something turning inside me saying that I wouldn’t lose this home.”
Faced with this recalcitrant woman, some suggested to Michelle that her mother needed psychiatric help.
Bertha’s first eviction date was November 8, 2011, only a few days after her husband returned home from another stint in the hospital. She had begun teaching him to garden as physical therapy, and she was proud that he could feel his way around their single-story house. She had continued to make a home for her husband and children, and nothing—no bank, cataracts, layoffs, or piece of paper—was going to stop her. Through negotiations with Bank of New York Mellon in October, she briefly got the company to agree to sell her the house for the $12,000, the same as the auction sale price.
But by the New Year, Bertha’s troubles had only increased. In December, William went back into the hospital for brain hemorrhaging, and his brother died. She broke the news about the brother’s death to William at his bedside, but she still kept the foreclosure a secret. The bank had changed its mind once again, doubling the purchasing price and then withdrawing the offer entirely. On January 26, Bertha was served with her final eviction notice, with the date set for January 30, 2012. It was less than a week away. She understood the legal reality of the situation, but she had also made up her mind.
“I can’t see myself moving,” she told her daughter a few nights before January 30. “How can you move a home?”
Bertha Garrett resolved to stay.
78. Elvin Wyly, C.S. Ponder, Pierson Nettling, Bosco Ho, Sophie Ellen Fung, Zachary Liebowitz, and Dan Hammel, “New Racialized Meanings of Housing in America,” American Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3, September 2012, p. 575.
79. Debbie Gruenstein Bocian, Wei Li, and Carolina Reid, Lost Ground, 2011: Disparities in Mortgage Lending and Foreclosures, Center for Responsible Lending (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, November 2011), p. 8.
80. Ofelia O. Cuervas, “Welcome to My Cell: Housing and Race in the Mirror of American Democracy,” American Quarterly Vol. 64, No. 3, September 2012, p. 613.
81. Testimonies in: John P. Relman et al., “Plaintiff Mayor and City Council of Baltimore’s Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the Amended Complaint,” Mayor and City Council of Baltimore vs. Wells Fargo. Document 133, filed 10/16/09. Available online at: http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FH-MD-0001-0009.pdf
82. For more information see the U.S. Department of Justice’s complaint against Countrywide, which was the largest lending discrimination lawsuit in DOJ history, leading to a $335 million settlement. The DOJ alleged that Countrywide discriminated against 200,000 families. http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/hce/documents/countrywidecomp.pdf
83. Testimonies in: John P. Relman, et. al. “Plaintiff Mayor and City Council of Baltimore’s Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the Amended Complaint,” Mayor and City Council of Baltimore vs. Wells Fargo. Document 133, filed 10/16/09. Available online at: http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FH-MD-0001-0009.pdf
84. Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination,” California Law Review, Vol. 94, Issue 1, January 2006. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol94/iss1/3
85. Dan Childs, “Foreclosure-Related Suicide: a Sign of the Times?” ABC News, July 25, 2008. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/DepressionNews/story?id=5444573&page=1
86. “Foreclosure Threat Drives Some to Suicide,” CBS News, March 24, 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/24/national/main6329383.shtml
87. “Ohio Woman, 90, Attempts Suicide After Foreclosure,” Reuters, October 3, 2008. http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/10/03/us-foreclosure-shooting-idUSTRE4928IS20081003
88. Alan Macher, “Ocala,” in Where to Retire, May/June 2012, pp. 62-68.
89. Meghan Neal and Erik Ortiz, “Man kills himself days before eviction from California home in foreclosure,” New York Daily News, May 23, 2012. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/man-kills-days-eviction-california-home-foreclosure-article-1.1083046
“Three dead in New Years Day foreclosure murder suicide,” CUCollector.com. http://blog.cucollector.com/hot-topics/three-dead-in-foreclosure-murder-suicide/
“Georgia police say man known as ‘chicken man’ is presumed dead in home explosion,” Fox News, March 27, 2012. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/03/27/georgia-police-say-man-known-as-chicken-man-may-have-blown-up-home-to-avoid/
Evan Bedard, “Houston couple commits suicide after being faced with foreclosure,” LoanSafe.org, May 17, 2010. http://www.loansafe.org/houston-couple-commits-suicide-after-being-faced-with-foreclosure
90. The Greenspan’s Body Count project. http://greenspansbodycount.blogspot.com/
91. Nick Turse, “The Body Count on Main Street,” In These Times, December 19, 2008.http://inthesetimes.com/article/4101/the_body_count_on_main_street/
92. Jerry Goldberg, “How the Banks Destroyed Detroit,” Workers World, March 31, 2011. http://www.workers.org/2011/us/banks_destroyed_detroit_0407/
93. Foreclosure data from personal interviews with Steve Babson, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, who analyzed foreclosure data from RealtyTrac.
94. Goldberg, “How the Banks Destroyed Detroit.”
95. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook: Growth Resuming, Dangers Remain, Chapter 3: Dealing with Household Debt, April 2012, p. 99. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2012/01/pdf/c3.pdf
96. “Home Wreckers: How Wall Street Foreclosures Are Devastating our Communities.” http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kgo/PDF/Home-Wreckers-Report.pdf
97. Ibid.
98. The figures represent 110,000 bank foreclosures multiplied by $2,000 and $19,000, respectively.
99. Bill Vlasic and Steven Yaccino, “Detroit Waits, Apprehensive, for Manager to Take Over,” the New York Times, March 23, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/us/defiant-anxious-detroit-gets-an-emergency-manager.html
100. Krissah Thompson, “Possibility of emergency manager in Detroit prompts civil rights concerns,” the Washington Post, January 5, 2012. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-01-05/politics/35440087_1_emergency-manager-civil-rights-bettie-buss
101. “Signs Warn of Crackhead Infestation at Detroit Park” CBS Detroit, May 17, 2012. http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/05/17/signs-warn-of-crackhead-infestation-at-detroit-park/
102. Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
103. Matthew Dolan, “Detroit Schools’ Cuts Plan Approved,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703610604576158783513445212.html