Cleveland pointed to in housing adversity

CLEVELAND (AP) — The city of Cleveland contributed to its foreclosure crisis by helping low- income people buy homes with mortgage payments they couldn’t afford, a newspaper investigation published Sunday found.

The city provided loans of up to $20,000 through the federally funded Afford-A-Home program but did not check whether recipients could afford to stay in the homes, The Plain Dealer reported Sunday. Cleveland, which has one of the nation’s worst foreclosure problems, did not change its policies even as hundreds of people defaulted on their mortgages.

The city is making changes to its practices, while the federal government will review Cleveland’s program.

“This administration is committed to making certain that federally funded homebuyer assistance programs support sustainable home ownership,” said U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Brian Sullivan in a statement. “When done well, we know that these programs work.”

The newspaper’s review of more than 50 Afford-A-Home files in Cleveland found that some recipients of the loan program made as little as $15,000 a year.

An analysis of property and loan records from 2000 to 2007 found that many of the hundreds of loan recipients, mainly low-income people, defaulted on their mortgages within two years of receiving the loans. Over eight years, nearly half of the 584 homes sold by the three largest for-profit companies who participated in the program have entered foreclosure — and more than one-third of those have been sold at a sheriff’s sale or are abandoned.

They largely became a lost investment for the city, and represented a loss of tax dollars of $2.3 million, the review found.

The for-profit companies that are the driving forces behind the loan program — such as Cresthaven Development Corp., Rysar Properties Inc. and Pebblebrook Properties Inc. — are responsible for sending prospective buyers’ Afford-A-Home applications to the city.