Portside

Chicago began receiving program money in 2009, roughly a year after the housing market crashed. In the six years since, the city has collected $169 million — of which $140 million went to rehabbing and demolishing homes. But records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the city spent money on buildings with luxury finishes in gentrifying areas while distressed properties in some of the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods were left to languish.

A growing number of city workers, teachers, and other union workers can’t live here anymore.

A Better Place | Playing For Change. 'SaveCanada' Punks TransCanada. Out of the Furnace: Movie. A Bold Plan to Fix the Mortgage Mess. The Musical Genius: Derek Paravicini. New Drugs for Old Bugs.

"We certainly don't want anybody going without a place to live, but we have our orders."

Other People's Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made was what the trade calls OPM, or other's people's money, that was lost, mostly in investments from pension funds that were then bundled and sold as mortgage-linked securities. With many mortgages shaky, these securities made for a toxic stew, and that practice nationwide fed the housing collapse and the onset of the Great Recession in late 2007.

In Richmond, California, home prices plummeted 58 percent since their peak. Now the city is trying out a new way to help homeowners refinance—and halt the slide into foreclosure.

The sequester means that most federal budgets must be reduced by as much as five percent. Housing is taking a huge hit. I’ve been stewing about it for days now. I want to ask the important people in Washington – starting with the one in the White House – how could they let something like this happen? How, in the richest, most powerful country on the planet, could they visit such cruelty on people?

Five years after Wall Street crashed the economy, not one banker has been prosecuted for the reckless and fraudulent practices that cost millions of Americans their jobs, threw our cities and schools into crisis, and left families and communities ravaged by a foreclosure crisis and epidemic of underwater mortgages.

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