Rev. Jesse Jackson leads the fight against predatory lending

The Reverend Jesse Jackson led a march to a Laurelton house surrounded by weeds after calling for a new civil rights movement to fight rising foreclosures and high-cost lending that have plagued minorities disproportionately - and southeast Queens, in particular.
“This is the economic crisis of our time,” Jackson said at St. Luke’s Cathedral on 232nd Street shortly before the noon march on Tuesday, December 18.
He said African Americans have been preyed on before by insurance scams and payday lenders - but warned this crisis could lead to a national recession.
“We need to restructure loans and stop repossessing homes,” the activist minister said.
Blacks are four times more likely than whites to take out a loan issued by a subprime lender, according to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
High-cost or “subprime” loans are supposed to be geared to people with bad credit. They begin with a low introductory interest rate that can balloon after a few years to more than 11 percent, putting families at risk of foreclosure.
Jackson said he’s seen cases where a black family making $100,000 was steered to a subprime loan while a white family earning $30,000 was given a lower-interest prime loan.
Queens leads the city in court filings that signify the beginning of the foreclosure process, according to the Furman Center. Some 14,000 homes citywide are in danger of foreclosure.
Ten southeast Queens neighborhoods - Springfield Gardens, Rosedale, St. Albans, South Ozone Park, Jamaica, Far Rockaway, Queens Village, South Richmond Hill, Locus Manor and East Elmhurst - make up half of the city’s top 20 Census districts with the largest number of residents paying for their mortgages with subprime loans, according to a report by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
Jackson called for clergy to meet with lenders and borrowers to renegotiate loans, and for the federal Housing Administration to better regulate the lending market. He also called on state attorneys general to subpoena records of subprime lenders and launch investigations.
After marching to 230th Street while chanting, “A people united will never be defeated,” the crowd of more than 100 homeowners and their advocates stopped at the abandoned former home of Janice Gresham, 50.
Gresham said her husband got sick three years ago. The family could only afford to pay half of the mortgage, but the bank refused. Gresham found a buyer who agreed to let her live in the home but she was evicted in October, before the deal was sealed. Now the five-bedroom home is an empty neighborhood eyesore, with peeling paint and an unwieldy garden.
“The bank didn’t care,” Gresham said. “It’s hard to fight these battles by yourself. I felt so alone.”
Across the street, Vinton Dallas, 62, was assembling three reindeers wrapped in Christmas lights on his lawn. He hadn’t known about the march, but knew all about the issue - first hand.
Dallas said two years ago the auto repair shop where he worked closed down and he went into credit card debt. He refinanced his home with a subprime loan that started at 10 percent, but will rise to 15 percent in three years. “They said I could refinance again before it gets to that point,” Dallas said.
“That’s unethical,” said Dwayne Jones, director of lending for The Parodneck Foundation, which teams with the government to offer advice to homeowners.
“What the borrower is doing is setting the person up for failure,” said Jones, who gave his business card to Dallas.