Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

If the raw number of entries on Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court’s online docket is to be believed, 1,582 civil foreclosure cases were filed in the month of December.  That’s more than in any previous month, ever.

Nearly half of that record number — 741 new cases — were filed between December 22 and New Year’s Eve.

This unexpected “Christmas rush” by lenders’ attorneys may have pushed the Court’s 2008 foreclosure total, which had been running about 3% behind last year’s, to a new all-time yearly high.  According to NEO CANDO, last year’s record foreclosure count was 14,050 cases filed.  It now appears that the final count for 2008 has topped it.

A story in yesterday’s Beacon-Journal told us that “The counties that include Akron and Cleveland are reporting that 2008 brought declining numbers of lawsuits filed by banks and other lenders to begin the foreclosure process.”

Unfortunately, not so much.

Update 1/3: Got an email from Steve Wertheim, the director of United Way’s 211/First Call for Help service, which takes calls from people facing foreclosure and refers them out to counseling agencies:

Bill, the first eight months of the year our numbers were lower then 07, but from September-December our numbers were higher then 07. Also the big change is that Cleveland represented 46% of the calls in 08 down from 53% in 07. And we are seeing a lot more calls from the outer ring suburbs in 08 than 07.

Wells Fargo Bank has joined Deutsche Bank’s request to the Federal District Court to take over the Cleveland Housing Court suit brought two weeks ago by a subsidiary of Neighborhood Progress.

The temporary restraining order issued by Housing Court Judge Pianka, blocking the two banks from selling off three dozen vacant foreclosed properties, expired Monday.

Attorneys for the Cleveland Housing Renewal Project, which represents CDCs for the neighborhoods where the properties are located, believed as late as last Friday that they had an agreement will Wells Fargo to extend the order while the case (seeking to have the banks rehab the properties prior to sale or let the CDCs take them through receivership) was litigated in the local court.  But the neighborhood groups learned yesterday that Wells Fargo has instead joined Deutsche Bank in asking a Federal judge to remove the case from Pianka’s jurisdiction.

No word on when the Federal Court will respond to the two banks’ filings.

Mary Kane has a long article about the case posted yesterday at the Washington Independent.

Fourteen months ago I wrote this post, which quoted an AT&T sales crew manager to the effect that Cleveland city residents were unlikely to see any “cable competition” from AT&T’s ballyhooed U-Verse service for at least two and a half years, i.e. until mid-2010.

I was not at all surprised by this. In 2006, when so-called “cable franchise reform” was being pushed through the General Assembly in the form of SB 117, one of the major concerns of skeptics like me was that it relieved incumbent cable companies like Time Warner of their city-imposed obligations to serve less attractive city neighborhoods, in exchange for an AT&T “competitive cable” product that might never arrive in those neighborhoods.

But I was surprised yesterday, when I drove past my neighborhood library branch at Pearl and Mapledale and noticed this new arrival on the tree lawn .

What is it?  It’s a “Video Ready Access Device”, aka VRAD.  It’s where AT&T connects its fiber network (under the street) to its pole-hung copper wires to enable U-Verse services in the surrounding area.

And it’s a sign that AT&T is about to start competing for cable customers in Brooklyn Centre.

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If you want to understand how all those thousands and thousands of bad mortgages got originated by institutions at the top of the US banking industry — or if you still think those institutions were hapless victims of lying homebuyers and government “community reinvestment” pressures — you must read this article in yesterday’s New York Times on how Washington Mutual Bank of Seattle subprimed itself into the biggest bank failure in US history.

Peter Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson Interviewed two dozen former WaMu employees in California, Florida, Illinois and Texas, and reviewed the “accounts of …89 other former employees who are confidential witnesses in a class action filed against WaMu in federal court in Seattle by former shareholders.” 

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Cincinnati Enquirer Wednesday:

Cincinnati wants Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo to pay for what officials say is neglect of foreclosed-upon properties that’s worsening blight in city neighborhoods.

The banks own more than 100 properties in Hamilton County. Representatives appear often in local courts to prosecute foreclosure actions against property owners, the city says in a lawsuit, but don’t show up when Cincinnati asks them to maintain abandoned properties titled to them.

The city wants repayment for boarding up, demolishing and the other work done to Deutsche and Wells Fargo properties. The suit didn’t specify an amount.

“This lawsuit is one attempt to end the abuse of our local neighborhoods and the loss of value associated with the foreclosure crisis,” according to a statement released by the city Tuesday.

Deutsche Bank, in an Enquirer analysis published last year, had bought the most foreclosed properties in Hamilton County in 2007 – 265. The German banking company didn’t own even one parcel in the county three years before. But Deutsche officials denied owning any houses here, saying the bank acts only as a trustee for investment groups that buy up sub-prime mortgages.

(h/t Safeguard Properties All Client Alerts, which links Cincinnati’s suit to the one filed by Neighborhiood Progress in Cleveland Housing Court two weeks ago.)

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Those foreclosures just keep on coming.

As of December 12, the total of 2008 civil foreclosures filed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court had reached 13,073… just 3% fewer than the 13,480 filed by the same date in 2007.

(Data is from NEO CANDO.)

Will we hit 14,000 again this year? Maybe not. Does it make any difference if we miss it by a couple of hundred? Not hardly.

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The Plain Dealer sure thinks so.  So does Carole at Cleveland Real Estate News.

Carole and I (P.S. and others) have been talking it over in her comments.

Update:  Here’s the only coherent explanation of HB 196’s “transferable tax credit” scheme I’ve been able to find.  And also from the Beacon Journal’s Dennis Willard, some perspective on the politics.

Cincinnati Enquirer yesterday (h/t Spencer and Mike):

Hamilton County commissioners Wednesday voted to support a statewide, six-month moratorium on home foreclosures.

The Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati, among several groups pushing for the moratorium, asked the commission to support the proposal.

The group also plans a Dec. 24 press conference.

The moratorium calls for legislation to delay foreclosures until details are worked out in federal programs that could help homeowners.

“We don’t want homeowners to lose their home because … (the foreclosure) comes hours or days before a bill is adopted … that would provide help or relief,” said Commissioner Todd Portune.

A projected 7,200 foreclosures will be filed this year in Hamilton County, according to the commission.

Commissioner David Pepper, who has spearheaded local efforts to prevent foreclosures, said this vote builds on that work.

The Ohio Senate voted 33-0 yesterday to concur with the House version of Senate Bill 353, the bill to allow Cuyahoga County to establish a “land reutilization corporation” that can acquire, hold, and either demolish or rehabilitate vacant foreclosed properties.

The bill now needs only Governor Strickland’s signature to become law.

A month ago the bill had not yet had its first hearing, and many observers (including me) thought it was dead until next year. Its rapid passage by both houses in the lame duck session is the fruit of an incredible advocacy push led by County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, who’s been working for this day for thirteen months. And yes, to a great nonpartisan effort by Republican Senator Tom Patton of Strongsville, the original House sponsor who, as a new member of the Senate, got the ball rolling there.

Congratulations to both of them and to many others who helped, including the Cuyahoga County citizens who got on a bus twice in the last couple of weeks to travel to Columbus and show grassroots support at the Senate and House hearings.

P.S. Oh yes… congratulations are also due to the Plain Dealer editorial page, which really went to bat for the land bank bill when it counted.

Is the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court’s Foreclosure Mediation Program having any impact on the number of sheriff’s sales resulting from foreclosures in Cleveland?

No such impact is apparent so far.

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