"Wild West" Lending Practices Blamed For Cleveland-Area Foreclosure Problems

In Cleveland / Cuyahoga County, Ohio, CNNMoney reports:

• As the Treasurer of Cuyahoga County in Ohio, Jim Rokakis spends a lot of his time trying to deal with Cleveland's foreclosure crisis. When asked recently just how bad it is, Rokakis unfurled a six-foot by four-foot Cleveland city plot map. Each lot was covered with dots of red ink where foreclosed homes filled the plots. From a few feet away, the map looked heavily freckled, while some neighborhoods nearly melted together in crimson masses.

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• According to Rokakis, Cleveland got hammered because lax governmental oversight from the state allowed Wild-West lending. "No one was watching," he said. "There was no sheriff in town. The state legislature was dominated by banking interests."

For more, see Where Cleveland went wrong (It's too easy to blame the city's housing collapse on Rust-belt economics. How bad government and greed made it one of the nation's foreclosure capitals) (if link expires, try here).

See also, Mortgage fraud task force opens command center in Cleveland ("Federal, state and Cuyahoga County agencies will fill the office with seven full-time and six part-time staff, county Prosecutor Bill Mason said. Investigators will collaborate on cases that may number in the thousands and involve hundreds of millions of dollars. [...] Mason's office already has charged more than 140 people in cases involving more than 200 properties and $37.5 million in loans.").