News
Richmond residents hold banks accountable for helping rebuild city hard-hit by the foreclosure crisis
Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO), March 17, 2009
On Thursday, March 12, over 500 residents from the hard-hit city of Richmond, CA packed St. Mark's Catholic Church to ask city, county, and bank leaders to take aggressive steps to deal with the approximately 2,000 abandoned, foreclosed bank-owned properties in this city of 100,000.
Faith leaders from PICO affiliate Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization worked with allies including ACORN, Richmond Equitable Development Initiative, Center for Responsible Lending, and the University of California Berkeley to produce a detailed report documenting the full extent of real-estate-owned property in the city, and a lending analysis of the three banks that had the city's highest volume of foreclosures: Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase that shows alarming racial disparities in the banks' lending practices.
CCISCO and its allies received public commitments from the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors to "do whatever is necessary" to help bring the banks to the negotiating table in the next 30 days, as well as commitments to:
- Aggressively fine banks $1,000 a day in Richmond and County for abandoned and unsecured properties (per existing state law, SB 1137)
- Place all acquired foreclosed properties into a land trust to keep them permanently affordable
- Establish a job training and local hiring program to employ local residents in securing, maintaining, rehabilitating and "greening" abandoned properties that are acquired by the City
- Establish a local "revolving loan fund" that would allow local residents (especially those who were victims of predatory lending) to acquire these properties
- Mechanics Bank also agreed to negotiate a community investment agreement to help capitalize the fund (alongside local and county governments)
For more information on Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization, visit www.ccisco.org
Media Coverage
Group Documents Richmond Housing Crisis and Demands Action, Contra Costa Times
More Information
Research report: Transforming the Housing Crisis in Richmond, March 2006
