Kids & Family

Resident Launches Hunger Strike to Protest Foreclosure Fraud

Says states and federal government need to prosecute lenders who did not help homeowners facing foreclosure

A local author and one of the leaders in the Occupy Petaluma movement has launched a hunger strike to protest what he describes as massive fraud by banks in the wake of the foreclosure crisis.

Fifty-four-year-old resident Petaluma resident Tim Nonn, who lost his home to foreclosure two years ago, has embarked on a week-long hunger strike to bring attention to the plight of homeowners around the country and to call for a statewide moratorium on foreclosures.  

“Following the Savings & Loan crisis, there were over 1,800 prosecutions,” Nonn says. “If one of us went to the store and stole a candy, we’d be prosecuted, yet not a single bank executive has been prosecuted for foreclosure fraud.”  

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Earlier this year, California Attorney General Kamala Harris launched a special task force to investigate how banks handled foreclosures amidst allegations of fraudulent activities. These included robo-signing, a practice in which banks signed foreclosure documents and affidavits without reviewing the information contained in them and accounting violations that are being blamed for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary foreclosures around the state.

But attaining anything akin to justice has thus far proved elusive, with most homeowners still lost in a tangle of 1-800 numbers as they scramble to modify their mortgages and banks blaming borrowers for their inability to pay.

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The only thing that has come closest is the $26 billion settlement between five banks and the Department of Justice in February that aims to help troubled borrowers by reducing the amount they owe on their mortgages, lowering their interest rates and paying restitution to homeowners who suffered mortgage-related abuses.

Nonn’s is the second known hunger strike to protest foreclosures in California in recent years. The first was started by on March 21 to protest the foreclosure of her Nevada home whose values she says Wells Fargo fraudulently inflated to $718,000 in 2005.

A review of the appraisal deemed that the appraisal was inaccurate and overestimated the value of the Vieiras’ property by $200,000. But a lawsuit the couple filed in 2009 was thrown out by a Nevada court, on grounds that it lacked merit, and the family lost their home in 2010.

Armand Ramirez, a Petaluma real estate agent, says that although many banks inflated home prices over the past decade, blaming them is not fair.

“Sure, the lenders were stretching values, but it was the buyers who were making the offers,” he says. “No one forced them to buy that house.”

But to Nonn, the bank practices are deceptive and need to be regulated, first through a statewide moratorium on foreclosures and then through prosecution of lenders and others who committed abuses by forging documents, qualifying people for sub-prime mortgages and then failing to help homeowners who found themselves in foreclosure.

Occupy groups throughout the state plan to take turns going on hunger strikes to bring attention to the issue they say is ripping apart families and communities.

“When we lost our house, it was like a bomb going off,” recalls Nonn, adding that the foreclosure caused a lot of stress for the family and resulted in him and his wife getting a divorce. “People don’t realize that it impacts not only the immediate family, but also your friends and neighbors, it ripples out to our whole community. I am so grateful for the Occupy movement because before I was so ashamed, I didn’t even tell my church. But since the movement started last year, I’ve been able to find my voice.”

CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated the number of abuse and corruption cases prosecuted during the savings & loan crisis of the '80s. The correct number is 1,800, according to Tim Nonn, not 18,000. Petaluma Patch regrets the error.


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