Home Foreclosures

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I wish to say one last word about an issue that affects my State and many others too. We received news today that the foreclosures of houses in Illinois have increased dramatically over last year--a 25-percent increase in foreclosures in Illinois over the last year. The same thing is true of many other States. The States hit the hardest are Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, Utah, Idaho, Michigan, Illinois, Oregon, and Georgia.

We have to do more. The current system we have to deal with foreclosures is not working well. I met this morning with Treasury Secretary Geithner and gave him some ideas. I hope my colleagues will join me in coming up with approaches that will try to save people from this terrible outcome of foreclosure. Many people have lost their jobs and cannot pay their mortgages. Understandable. Maybe we can help them stay in their houses as renters or some other circumstance. Some have seen the value of their home start to decline to the point where the value of the home is less than the outstanding mortgage and there is no incentive to continue to sacrifice and make a mortgage payment for a home that is worth a fraction of its original value.

Those are realities. But the reality of foreclosure is obvious. I was with Congresswoman JAN SCHAKOWSKY in Evanston, IL, a few days ago. We went down Gray Street and saw homes that had been good, solid, middle-class homes now boarded up literally for years that have become a blight on that neighborhood, dragging down the value of every other home and threatening the safety of the neighborhood as they become drug and crime havens. We are also seeing a phenomena like that in places such as Marquette Park in Chicago where the depopulation of neighborhoods is leading to commercial flight--food deserts in the city of Chicago brought about by foreclosures.

These banks have not done enough, period. They have not stepped up to their responsibility. I tried to change the Bankruptcy Code to give us a fighting chance for a bankruptcy judge to rewrite a mortgage to avoid foreclosure, and I was defeated by the banks. They have a powerful lobby on Capitol Hill even to this day despite what we have gone through.

This foreclosure situation has gone from bad to worse. I don't believe America can truly recover economically until we address this issue in a forthright manner. I look forward to working with the Treasury Secretary and the administration to do that when we return from the Presidents Day recess.

I yield the floor.

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