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Cleveland Loses Bid to Get Bank Money for Housing Bust

Cleveland is sort of my home town. Not that I lived right there in the actual city, but a lot of my family is from there, and I am originally from the Greater Cleveland area. Now I reside in the Greater Akron area, and I really like it there. I like Cleveland too, although it gets a bad rap in a lot of areas for whatever reason. Shoot, we couldn’t even keep LeBron James in the city, we lost him to the Heat.

But I digress, what I’m talking about here is Cleveland’s loss in their court plea to make the banks they feel were responsible for the predatory lending and lax rules that led to the housing bust in their area, pay up on housing market woes that they felt could be pinned on the deep pocketed banking system. They actually named several high profile banks in their suit.

Many areas of Cleveland have been really hard-hit when it comes to housing troubles. It wasn’t too long ago that you’d drive down some roads that barely had any actual residents in them, you’d just see a bunch of for sale signs and vacant properties thanks to foreclosures and home sales of people trying to get out of Dodge before their real estate prices sunk even further and they lost out big on their investments.

Even in 2007, before the true nature of the recessionary beast had shown itself, Cleveland had one fo the worst foreclosure rates in the country, and actually had almost one fifth of the bad loans in the nation, accounting for 1/5 of the zip codes that were on the “worst of” lists.

Even though you have to give them credit for giving it the good try, they lost their court battle, as a court could not find convincing evidence that the banks themselves were responsible for this terrible outcome and the ruining of neighborhoods, loss of jobs and more.

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