Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
Attorney General Martha Coakley, speaking at the Women Elected Municipal Officials luncheon in Boston on Jan. 23, encouraged attendees to support efforts that can help people victimized by the mortgage foreclosure crisis.
Coakley, who four days later filed legislation that would require lenders to modify home loans under some circumstances, argued that it is essential that all levels of government work to reduce the number of properties that are left vacant.
“A foreclosure is obviously a problem for the family that has to move out, but it’s also a problem for you,” Coakley told her audience of about 170 women mayors, councillors, aldermen, selectmen and other local officials.
She noted that foreclosures can have a ripple effect on neighborhoods, driving down property values and inviting crimes such as arson and the stripping of copper. (Her proposed legislation would create a statewide abandoned housing registry as well as a second-hand metal registry.) She added that widespread foreclosures can haunt cities for years, in the form of chronically vacant buildings.
“It has been discouraging to see, both in the private sector and, frankly, in Washington, an inability to see that we need to get people back in their homes,” Coakley said. “If we can bail out the people who created this mess, we can certainly find a way to bail out those people who have been victimized by that behavior.”
In Massachusetts, “We’ve been active in looking for bankruptcy relief for those for whom that is a good option,” Coakley said. “And we think that many servicers and lenders will modify their loans rather than go to bankruptcy [court].”
Coakley also highlighted steps her office is taking to make it easier for cities and towns to have abandoned properties placed in receivership, enabling nonprofits to acquire and rehabilitate them. She noted that her colleague Matthew Berge, who oversees her office’s Abandoned Housing Initiative, was a panelist that same afternoon on an MMA workshop titled “Managing Foreclosed Properties: Tools for Stabilizing Neighborhoods.”
As for the hope that a federal stimulus bill will aid local efforts to combat foreclosures, Coakley said, “I am reminded of the intonation of the sisters of St. Joseph when we were growing up: ‘You can pray as if everything depended upon God, but work as if everything depended upon you.’
“In this case, the federal government is God. You can pray, but you still have to do the work to make sure that the Commonwealth will be in the best position to mitigate this damage and turn it around.”