Jessica Yager and Franklin Romeo know what it means for a neighborhood to be "hard hit" by predatory and discriminatory lending. As directors of the Foreclosure Prevention Project and Consumer Rights Project at Queens Legal Services, they have led a team of lawyers and advocates to assist more than 800...

For our third dispatch this month (see previous posts here and here), I spoke with David McDowell, a senior organizer at the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP) in Chicago, IL. David, who has more than 20 years of community organizing experience, works with SWOP's members to build...

The long-anticipated foreclosure settlement announced last week by President Obama and the state attorneys general includes $5 billion that will flow to the states to support foreclosure prevention efforts, including the work of legal services and housing counseling providers. Given questions about whether the settlement will do enough...

Foreclosures aren't going away. By now, the abuses that brought us to this point and continue to sink us further into the crisis -- predatory lending practices, hastily securitized loans and mortgage servicing errors -- are well known. Accountability for these abuses, however, remains an open question.

As we...