Mark Winston Griffith

Unite, Predatory Lending Foes, Unite!

Let's be fair: All of the government and elected officials now falling over themselves to show that they are doing something about predatory lending is a good thing. I guess. Or at least it's better than nothing happening at all.

But that's not good enough. Over the past few weeks countless hearings have been called, foreclosure prevention mechanisms have been established and numerous tasks forces have been set up in New York by government agencies, Congress people, state legislators and council people alike, very few of whom have bothered to coordinate with one another or tap into the vigorous anti-predatory lending advocacy network in New York that has been working on these issues for almost ten years. It doesn't seem to matter to some officials and their staff that they are in fact duplicating and, in some cases, even disrupting existing anti-predatory lending work. And although the Mayor has in recent weeks made troubling statements about his unwillingness to tackle the foreclosure crisis in New York, he at least deserves credit for participating in PACE (the Preserving Assets and Community Equity program, a modest, but viable collaborative effort to address the scourge of predatory lending) before anti-forclosure work became so politically sexy.

What New York State needs is a leader who is smart and savvy enough to harness the existing anti-predatory lending efforts, while commanding enough respect to get all the wannabes to coordinate all the new and disparate quick fix proposals that are hitting streets. But before that can happen it will take the politicos in this town to start concentrating on what their value added is rather than simply covering their political behinds.

Posted at 10:53 PM, Apr 26, 2007 in Economic Opportunity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)