The House Next Door is a documentary about how the foreclosure crisis of 2008 ripped through the Greater Cleveland area, | dG1fSFFCeFF3ZG0yRUU
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Short filmTranscript
00:00I saw recently a study that said that there are no natural disasters in Cleveland, which
00:11made it the safest place in the country to live, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, but we
00:16had a tsunami, and our tsunami was the mortgage foreclosure crisis.
00:23What could be safer than an American mortgage?
00:26Sure, some mortgages would always go bad, but generally there was probably not a safer
00:31bet.
00:34It was great.
00:35It was all about the money.
00:36People were getting insanely rich all the way up and down the line, except for the bond
00:42holders and the homeowners.
00:44After a while, the loan got switched from one company to another company to another
00:49company to another company.
00:51As the market really got crazy over those years, again, number one, everyone realized,
00:57hey, there's a lot of money to be made here.
00:59Each time it was switched, the mortgage went up, the rates went up, the fees went up.
01:05And then number two, everyone realized that we can make our own rules, and it became a
01:11race to the bottom.
01:13For many of these individuals and families, this was the largest investment of their lifetime.
01:19I kept getting foreclosed on, and like I said, I kept coming up with those dollar amounts.
01:24Now, we were going bankrupt coming up with those dollar amounts, but I kept doing it.
01:28People were forming title companies who never were in the business, because it was easy
01:32money.
01:33All we have to do is collect our fees.
01:34You know, I paid, it would have been two payments plus the third payment.
01:39The character at the bank says, we can't accept it.
01:42We just can't accept it.
01:43You're going into foreclosure.
01:44And when you see, you know, what used to be, say, 10 Cleveland, Ohio properties come
01:48in in a month go to a thousand, that is when I thought something is wrong.
01:54How could this have happened?
01:55Whole neighborhoods became decimated with vacancy abandonment, and what comes with vacancy
02:01abandonment is, of course, all the social ills, crime, drugs, arson.
02:06I was used to inner cities.
02:08This was like something I had never, ever seen.
02:10He looked like Slick Willy, very polished, he knew what he was doing.
02:14He got some trouble up in Ohio.
02:16He clearly knew what was going on.
02:18Needless to say, I didn't see my home for nearly four years after that morning.
02:22I mean, I was taken away and that was it.
02:25In our case, we basically had about a 10-year situation that we dealt with this before it
02:32really got resolved.
02:33But as the title wave came, more and more information was coming in from so many different
02:39areas.
02:41That's when I realized, I'm going to fight this thing to the bitter end.