They used to be known as the middle class.
"Priced out of big cities, middle class moves inland" by Shaila Dewan | New York Times August 04, 2014
OKLAHOMA CITY — Americans have never hesitated to pack up the U-Haul in search of the big time, a better job, or just warmer weather. But these days, domestic migrants are increasingly driven by the quest for cheaper housing.
I'm no longer surprised the $hilling pre$$titutes of the Amerikan media have self-internalized the agenda-pushing terminology in all they write. That's why this sucks now, among a ho$t of other reasons.
The country’s fastest-growing cities are now those where housing is more affordable than average, a decisive reversal from the early years of the millennium, when easy credit allowed cities to grow without regard to housing costs and when the fastest-growing cities had housing that was less affordable than the national average.
Among people who have moved long distances, the number of those who cite housing as their primary motivation for doing so has more than doubled since 2007.
Rising rents and the difficulty of securing a mortgage on the coasts have proved a boon to inland cities that offer the middle class a firmer footing and an easier life.
In the eternal competition among urban centers, the shift has produced some new winners.
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Since the start of the recession, the number of Americans who have moved each year has fallen sharply for a host of reasons, including the sluggish economy and the increasing similarity of job options from city to city. When people do move, they have all kinds of reasons, including family, climate, and, especially for those who move long distances, employment.
But the story was different from 2000 to 2006.
When that housing and stock bubble was being blown. You know, the good old days.
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For decades, Americans have flocked to the Sun Belt in search of a better life, first abandoning failing industrial centers like Detroit and Pittsburgh and then increasingly expensive superstar cities like New York and San Francisco, which have been replenished by immigrants.
But during the housing bubble, when even people with modest salaries could get loans to buy staggeringly expensive homes, the cost of housing was less of a concern. Now that getting a mortgage has become harder, the wage stagnation that has hobbled the middle class for years has deeper consequences.
“People have no choice,” said Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin. “They can’t move across the street; they have to move across the country.”
Refugees in your own land.
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Related: Walsh's World
Time to say bye-bye.
The insurance is where they get you now:
"New way to prey on homeowners" by Jeff Horwitz | Associated Press August 01, 2014
WASHINGTON — Companies overseeing millions of mortgage loans appear to be skirting new federal regulations and legal settlements intended to stop them profiteering at the expense of troubled homeowners.
They are selling nearly nonexistent insurance agencies — in some cases with no offices, no websites, and only a single registered agent — in multimillion dollar deals, as new rules prohibit them from collecting commissions on insurance they force homeowners to buy.
But remember, banks love you.
The deals illustrate how regulators are still wrestling with messy banking practices more than six years after the housing market’s collapse. They also mean that newly sold insurance agencies have an incentive to compel struggling homeowners to buy costly policies, to justify the high sales prices commanded when the insurance agencies were sold.
It's back to bu$ine$$ as usual because some are just too big to jail.
It's the face of failure.
The deals involve ‘‘force-placed insurance,’’ a type of backup property insurance meant to protect mortgage investors’ stake in uninsured properties. Standard mortgages require borrowers to maintain homeowners insurance and authorize the loan’s servicer to buy coverage when borrowers don’t. If the borrowers don’t pay for the new insurance, servicers foreclose on their properties and stick the bill to mortgage investors.
Even before the housing boom, mortgage servicers found ways to profit from buying insurance with other people’s money.
What a CRIMINAL RACKET!
Insurance carriers paid banks — including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup — to buy policies at inflated prices, according to an investigation by New York’s Department of Financial Services. To hide this ‘‘kickback culture,’’ as New York regulators described it, some servicers created virtual insurance agencies and disguised illicit payments as commissions.
Looks like LOOTING and FRAUD to me!
But hey, at least banks made billions last quarter. Everything's all right.
New rules by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, investigations by state regulators, and class-action settlements now prohibit servicers from collecting commissions on such insurance policies, and the country’s biggest brand-name banks have renounced the practice.
But some of the largest subprime mortgage servicers in the country — companies that handle the troubled loans most likely to be subject to the insurance policies — appear to skirt those rules or have already made profitable business arrangements that comply with them.
Because people tend to stop paying insurance when they’re struggling to keep up with their mortgage, the collapse of the housing market after 2007 turned the practice into a multibillion dollar industry. In many ways, force-placed insurance’s rise reflected the behavior that fed the housing bubble: After profiting from putting borrowers in homes they couldn’t afford, mortgage companies were profiting from inflated insurance bills they assigned to homeowners at risk of foreclosure.
In other words, NOTHING HAS CHANGED since the crash. It's BU$INE$$ as U$UAL!
And you wonder why I no0 longer want to waste my valuable time reading this slop?
The country’s second largest non-bank mortgage servicer, Nationstar Mortgage Holdings Inc., has been trying to sell an insurance agency for roughly $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sale.
Nationstar’s insurance agency, Harwood Service Co., has no website and no independent offices. The switchboard operators at Nationstar’s headquarters in Lewisville, Texas, said they haven’t heard of it. Employees of Assurant Inc., the insurance carrier whose policies Harwood sells, say the company is ‘‘just the name used when Nationstar refers us business.’’
In a phone interview, Harwood’s only registered insurance agent, a Nationstar consultant named Dennis DiMaggio, initially said he was semiretired. Asked how he could run a $100 million business in semiretirement, DiMaggio ended the call, then later said he had been joking.
Nationstar’s first attempt to sell its affiliated insurance agency fell through early this month after the Associated Press raised questions about the deal, prompting New York’s Department of Financial Services to look into it.
‘‘We have some concerns with the proposed transaction,’’ said Matt Anderson, a spokesman for the financial regulator, four days before the expected buyer withdrew. Nationstar is still seeking to sell the insurance agency, said one person who is familiar with its efforts but not authorized to discuss its business affairs.
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Related: Stock Sweep
By the time I get to the bottom of it I'm homeless.
