Michigan News
(2009-07-20)
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Jimmy Rudyk goes door to door offering loan modification help for at-risk homeowners.
"I'm still hopeful, but not proclaiming a huge victory yet."
That's Frank Ford, he's vice-president of Neighborhood Progress Incorporated, one of the main groups behind Opportunity Homes. He says rehab and demolition is one thing, but the foreclosure prevention part is "not easy to engage people and convince them that they have a problem if their loan hasn't reset yet."
"Once it resets and loan payment goes from $800 to $1200 a month," says Ford, "I think probably getting their attention is a little bit easier. But we're trying to approach people who aren't even in trouble yet."
In order to do that, Ford turns to a guy named Mike Schramm. Schramm is a programmer analyst at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Since 1988, the center has been collecting and analyzing data from a bunch of Ohio neighborhoods, like this one in Cleveland called Slavic Village:
"To make things simple we'll skip to a Slavic Village map that summarizes what's going on," explains Schramm.
On the map, we can see property, address, ward, the city it's in. We're also able to see which homes have sub-prime loans and high cost loans - that's all public record. We can also see which homes have their water turned off, that indicates a vacancy. And thanks to some proprietary data Opportunity Homes bought for $10,000, we can also see which homes in the neighborhood have adjustable rate mortgages that are going to reset sometime in the next 2 years.
So Schramm takes all of that data, crunches some numbers, puts it into a spreadsheet, and then prints it out along with a color-coded map of the neighborhood and sends it to this guy:
"Hi, my name is Jimmy and I'm working ESOP. We're partnering with Slavic Village and we're just in the neighborhood, passing out information if anyone has issues with their house payments, or if you know someone in the neighborhood that might be having an issue."
Jimmy Rudyk is with the foreclosure prevention group ESOP. It stands for Empowering and Strengthening Ohio's People. Rudyk takes the list that Schramm sends over from Case Western and he uses it to figure out which doors to knock on in order to offer help.
"There are always the few homeowners who have the specific answer of who are you, what are you doing, or might shut the door. And rightfully so," says Rudyk. "But then we also get people who say this is what I've been waiting for, this is a call from God."
Rudyk didn't get any of those reactions the day I tagged along. But according to a Cleveland State University study, ESOP has over an 80% foreclosure prevention success rate.
That's most likely due to ESOP's community organizing tactics. They like to drop hundreds of plastic sharks on banks that don't cooperate with loan modifications. They also once put up fliers with a phone number and the words "CALL ANGELO" on it. Turns out Angelo was Angelo Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial who's also now the target of a federal investigation. The number on the flier was his cell phone.
When I got back to Michigan, I asked Steve Bancroft over at the Detroit Office of Foreclosure Prevention and Response if they've got a similar plan in the works.
"In a word: Yes," says Bancroft. "Even though we don't go out and publicize it, the results are what is important."
So what are the results?
"That's hard to say at this point. Things are happening, things are being done. There will be a lot more information available as we go forward."
Bancroft wouldn't reveal much more, except that unlike Cleveland's 6 neighborhood approach, Detroit's plan targets the entire city. All 140 square miles of it. He also says they've got lots of data to sift through, and that there's a website in the works which will be unveiled soon. © Copyright 2012, Michigan Radio
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