U.S. Representatives listen to testimony about subprime lending.
For nearly 5 hours, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters listened to tales from the frontlines of the foreclosure crisis. As chair of the subcommittee on housing and community opportunity, she came to Cleveland to hear from everyone from local leaders like the mayor’s regional development chief Chris Warren...
WARREN: Call it hurricane greed.
… to lenders like Countrywide and Michael Van Buskirk who runs the Ohio Bankers League…
BUSKIRK: As history has repeatedly proven, scoundrels will flow into an enforcement vacuum.
Buskirk blamed many of the problems on lack of licensing for mortgage brokers.
Joining Representative Waters were several members of Ohio’s congressional delegation, including Dennis Kucinich, Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Marcy Kaptur.
Waters says she plans to take what she learned in Cleveland back to Washington. She says hearing stories of foreclosures in homes valued in the tens of thousands—rather than hundreds—was a wake up call for her.
WATERS: Coming from California, where you have extraordinarily high end properties, is that, all over America there are properties that don’t cost nearly as much, but they’re hurting even worse.
Waters says congress was slow to react to the growing foreclosure problem, and says she plans to spend more time on it in congress.