Public Employee Press

Union fights foreclosures with coalition

By ALFREDO ALVARADO

As foreclosures escalate, DC 37 lawyers are working to save individual members from losing their homes to the banks and the union and a community-labor coalition are fighting to make the banks help address the crisis.

Foreclosures in New York City rose 16 percent in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009, according to the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. But the largest banks, which got billions of dollars in federal bailouts, have stalled on modifying mortgages to let families stay in their homes.

"The banks prosper while these families suffer," said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts. "The value of nearby properties falls and whole communities are devastated."

The coalition led by Comptroller John C. Liu demanded in July that the city's major banks get serious about making modifications, speed up the process and freeze foreclosures when people apply to ease the burdens of their mortgages. The coalition announced its proposals at a news conference July 14, with Associate Director Oliver Gray speaking for DC 37.

The unions involved - DC 37, the largest public-employee council in the United States, the teachers, transit workers, hotel employees and Service Employees Local 32 BJ - represent over 500,000 working families. They didn't publicly threaten to withdraw their huge pension investments from the banks, but the potential for such action was clear. By Sept. 1, the banks agreed to begin meeting with Liu and the coalition on ways to save more New Yorkers from foreclosure.

When Local 1321 member Roma Ramdhna and her husband, Narmil Singh, tried to get their mortgage modified last year, they got the kind of bank runaround the coalition is fighting to end.

After Singh's hours as a limousine driver were cut drastically, they fell $13,000 behind on their mortgage. After dozens of telephone calls, the WAMU bank, which had been taken over by JPMorgan Chase, referred her to offices in Florida and Arizona. Several times, the bank demanded documents she had already submitted.

"I was extremely frustrated with the whole process," said Ramdhna, a Clerical Supervisor at the Queens Borough Public Library, who got help from DC 37's Municipal Employees Legal Services.

MELS attorneys Kaiesha Scarbrough and Rashana Cain had the loan extended from 30 to 40 years with the interest rate cut to 2 percent for the first five years.