Author Archives: David Reiss

Reiss on Supreme Court Mortgage Case

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Law360 quoted me in Supreme Court Takes Up Mortgage Rescission Timing Case (behind a paywall). It reads in part,

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on whether federal law requires borrowers to notify creditors in writing of their intention to rescind their mortgages or file a lawsuit making a similar claim within three years.

The petitioners in the case, Larry and Cheryle Jesinoski of Eagan, Minn., are seeking to overturn a September ruling in the Eighth Circuit that they were required to sue Countrywide Home Loans Inc. to have their mortgage financing rescinded within three years of the transaction closing. The Jesinoskis argue that the Truth In Lending Act only requires that they provide notice of rescission in writing within those three years.

But the case goes beyond a ruling in the Eighth Circuit. A Supreme Court ruling would resolve a circuit split that has seen the Third, Fourth and Eleventh circuits rule that borrowers have three years from closing to notify lenders in writing within three years of their intention to cancel their mortgages, while the First, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth circuits have found that a lawsuit must be filed within that three-year period, according to the Jesinoskis’ December petition for certiorari.

“The resulting rule does violence to the statutory text, manufactures legal obstacle for homeowners seeking to vindicate their rights under a law that was enacted to protect them, and risks flooding the federal courts with thousands of needless lawsuits to accomplish rescissions that Congress intended to be completed privately and without litigation,” the petition said.

TILA provides two different rescission rights to borrowers who apply for and receive a mortgage refinancing. The more common process allows such borrowers to rescind their mortgage within three days of closing and before any money is disbursed.

The law also provides a more expanded rescission right in situations where borrowers do not receive mandated disclosures. There, the law provides three years from the closing date to provide such notice, but with proof that the documents were not provided.

Prior to the 2007 financial crisis, such expanded rescission claims were rare, said Reed Smith LLP partner Robert Jaworski.

“A lot more people were in trouble on their mortgages and couldn’t make payments and were subject to foreclosure. That caused a lot of these claims to be made, much more than previously,” he said.

And that has made the need for resolving the circuit split that much more important.

“It’s kind of ambiguous. It’s not stated as a statute of limitations,” said Brooklyn Law School professor David Reiss.

Premature End to Foreclosure Review

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Congressman Cummings (D), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has sent a letter to Congressman Issa, the Chairman of the Committee, regarding the Independent Foreclosure Review. It opens,

I am writing to request that the Committee hold a hearing on widespread foreclosure abuses and illegal activities engaged in by mortgage servicing companies.  I request that the hearing also examine why the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) appear to have prematurely ended the Independent Foreclosure Review (IFR) and entered into a major settlement agreement with most of the servicers just as the full extent of their harm was beginning to be revealed. (1)

It goes on to assert that “some mortgage servicing companies engaged in widespread and systemic foreclosure abuses, including charging improper and excessive fees, failing to process loan modifications in accordance with federal guidelines, and violating automatic stays after borrowers filed for bankruptcy.” (2) It concludes that it “remains unclear why the regulators terminated the IFR prematurely, how regulators determined the compensation amounts servicers were required to pay under the settlement, and how regulators could  claim that borrowers who were harmed by these servicers would benefit more from the settlement . . . than by allowing the IFR to be completed.” (2)

The letter raises a number of important concerns, but I will focus on just one — “how did the regulators arrive at the compensation amounts in the settlement?” (9) This particular settlement was for billions of dollars from BoA, PNC, JPMorgan and Citibank. This is an extraordinarily large sum, but the public is left with no sense of whether this sum is proportional to the harm done. I have raised this concern with other billion dollar settlements. As the federal government moves forward with these large settlements, it should carefully consider their expressive function — does the penalty fit the wrongdoing?  And if so, how was that calculated? People want to know.

The Ghosts of the Housing Bubble

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NYC Councilmember Daniel Garodnick has released a report, The Ghosts of the Housing Bubble: How Debt, Deterioration, and Foreclosure Continue to Haunt New York after the Crash. The report opens,

New York continues to have the highest rents in the country and a housing crisis that has lasted for decades. Many residential rents are below market value – a result of the myriad of state and local laws that have been implemented to protect working and middle class tenants from being forced out of their homes. This gap between the current affordable rent and potential fair market value can fuel the imaginations of investors and owners who dream of squeezing out the unrealized value hidden in these properties. This leads some developers to make riskier and riskier decisions following visions of real estate fortune, only to find themselves tilting at windmills, stuck with unpayable mortgages and escalating maintenance costs. (1)

The report proposes a number of interesting solutions to the problems it identifies, all of which should be looked into further. I am particularly intrigued by the proposal that Community Reinvestment Act exams should include a review of “the quality of the investments being made, measuring if banks are lending mortgages to landlords with portfolios of distressed housing. Were their bad loans to be reflected in their CRA ratings, banks might change their behavior.” (8)

But as with a similar ANHD report, the magnitude of the proposed solutions does not seem to match that of the identified problems. Market forces are extraordinarily powerful in NYC right now. It is unclear whether initiatives such as the “First Look Program,” which gives “good developers the first opportunity to buy” properties in foreclosure, can do anything when valuations are so frothy and predatory equity is on the prowl. (1)

That being said, the report is still quite valuable for shining light once again on the problem of owners who seek to illegally force rent regulated tenants out of their homes.

 

NYC’s Housing Affordability Challenge

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NYC’s Comptroller Stringer has issued The Growing Gap: New York City’s Housing Affordability Challenge. The report tells

a sobering story—of stagnant incomes, rising rents, and a deepening affordability crunch, especially for the working poor and others at the lower end of the income spectrum. This financial squeeze comes despite significant housing investments during the 12 years of the Bloomberg mayoralty. From 2000 to 2012, this report found:

• Median apartment rents in New York City rose by 75 percent, compared to 44 percent in the rest of the U.S. Over the same period, real incomes of New Yorkers declined as the nation struggled to emerge from two recessions.

• Housing affordability—as defined by rent-to-income ratios—decreased for renters in every income group during this period, with the harshest consequences for poor and working class New Yorkers earning less than $40,000 a year.

• There was a dramatic shift in the distribution of affordable apartments, with a loss of approximately 400,000 apartments renting for $1,000 or less. This shift helped to drive the inflation-adjusted median rent from $839 in 2000 to $1,100 in 2012, a 31.1% increase. In some neighborhoods – among them Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Ft. Greene and Bushwick in Brooklyn, average real rents increased 50 percent or more over the 12-year period.

• The elderly and working poor are making up a growing portion of low-income households with 40 percent of the increase tied to households in which the head is 60 years or older.

• In 2000, renters earning between $20,000 and $40,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars were dedicating an average of 33 percent of their income to rental costs. Twelve years later that average jumped to 41 percent. Their housing circumstances became more precarious even though their labor force participation rates soared.

It is clear that affordable housing remains one of New York City’s most pressing needs. Mayor de Blasio has laid out a goal of creating or preserving 200,000 units of affordable housing over a 10-year period, an ambitious increase over the 165,000 units pledged under Mayor Bloomberg’s 12-year New Housing Marketplace Plan.

Now, with the winding down of one major housing initiative and the launching of another, it is appropriate to take stock of the City’s housing circumstances, to evaluate the changes that have taken place in the city’s housing ecology, and to outline strategies for future housing investment that are informed by the city’s evolving housing landscape. (1)

While the report diagnoses many of the problems in the housing market, it does much less in terms of proposing solutions to them. It also fundamentally misunderstands the role that new housing plays in the housing market (see page 24). The report only focuses on the high rents for the new units without taking into account the fact that those new units reduce the pressure on rents for older units of housing, a process that housing economists refer to as “filtering.” There is no question that the CIty needs to increase the supply of housing if it wants to reduce the cost of housing overall. The de Blasio Administration understands this. We will have to wait and see how the Mayor’s housing plan, to be released in May, will tackle the under-supply problem head on.

Inclusionary Housing and Stigma

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Hughen and Read have posted their abstract for Inclusionary Housing Policies, Stigma Effects and Strategic Production Decisions to SSRN (it is not available for download from there and must be purchased from the publisher one way or the other). The abstract reads,

Inclusionary housing policies enacted by municipal governments rely on a combination of legal mandates and economic incentives to encourage residential real estate developers to include affordable units in otherwise market-rate projects. These regulations provide a means of stimulating the production of mixed-income housing at a minimal cost to the public sector, but have been hypothesized to slow development and put upward pressure on housing prices. The results of the theoretical models presented in this paper suggest that inclusionary housing policies need not increase housing prices in all situations. However, any observed impact on housing prices may be mitigated by density effects and stigma effects that decrease demand for market-rate units. The results additionally suggest real estate developers are likely to respond to inclusionary housing policies by strategically altering production decisions.

The authors conclude that “Density bonuses can limit the upward pressure on housing prices in strong markets, but may prove much less effective in weak markets where developers have little incentive to increase production in response to this type of economic incentive.” (609)

As NYC Mayor de Blasio drafts his ambitious affordable housing plan, he needs to maintain flexibility in his inclusionary zoning initiative. I think the stigma effects discussed in the article are much less relevant in NYC than in many other jurisdictions because NYC has a long history of successful mixed-income housing projects. But I do think that the de Blasio Administration needs to ensure that its initiative is designed to work effectively during both strong and weak markets.  The administration will also need to ensure that it works well in the outer boroughs as well as in Manhattan’s red hot housing market.

Reiss on Hedge Funds’ GSE Strategy

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American Banker quoted me in Everything Lenders Need to Know About GSE Shareholders’ Lawsuits (behind a paywall, but available in full here). It reads in part,

A powerful group of shareholders is amplifying attacks on housing finance reform legislation as they await resolution of a major legal battle, attempting to slow momentum on the bill before it likely passes the Senate Banking Committee.

Several big hedge funds that stand to possibly win billions of dollars for their shares in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are leading the charge, both in federal court and in the court of public opinion.

New investors’ rights groups said to be backed by the funds have popped up in recent weeks attacking legislation by Sens. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Mike Crapo, the panel’s top Republican.

Their presence is yet another complicating factor in the tumult ahead of a scheduled April 29 vote by the committee, potentially hurting efforts to secure additional support for the measure.

“Now that different people have come out with their bills, it’s been laid bare that the people working on [government-sponsored enterprise] reform aren’t going to do major favors for the shareholders,” said Jeb Mason, a managing director at Cypress Group. “As a result, the shareholders have adjusted their strategy to muddy the waters – and, if they can, kill the Johnson-Crapo bill.”

*     *     *

As part of their effort, investors have begun taking their concerns public through new tax-exempt groups in Washington. The investors argue they were on the receiving end of a rotten deal from the government, particularly those that bought the stocks before the enterprises were put into conservatorship.

“The hedge funds have this incredibly sophisticated, multi-pronged strategy – lawsuits, legislation, academics on the payroll, funding anonymous PR campaigns, offering to buy the companies. They’re coming at it from all angles,” said David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

*     *     *

Given the size and complexity of the cases, it’s likely to take years before the matter is resolved entirely. Analysts have suggested that if both sides continue to push the issue, it could even rise up to the Supreme Court over the next several years.

“You’re talking about many-year or potentially, decades-long lawsuits,” said Reiss. “The stakes are humongous and the parties are incredibly sophisticated and well financed. The government parties’ incentives to settle are not the same as a private party – I could imagine them seeing this all the way through.”

“Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”

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Judge Chesler issued an Opinion in The Prudential Insurance Company of America et al. v. Bank of America, National Association et al., No. 13-1586 (Apr. 17, 2014), deciding the motion to dismiss the Complaint. Claims relating to fraud, a theory of underwriting abandonment and the 1933 Securities Act survived the motion to dismiss. The Court summarized the case as follows:

In a nutshell, this case arises from a dispute over the sale of certain residential mortgage-backed securities (“RMBS”) by Defendants [various Bank of America parties , including Merrill Lynch parties] to Plaintiffs [various Prudential parties]. The Complaint alleges that Defendants obtained the underlying mortgages, created the securitizations based on them, issued “offering Materials” for their sale, and sold them to Plaintiffs.

*     *     *

The Complaint alleges a variety of statistics in support of its claims. It is often not clear, however, what the basis for a particular statistic is. (1-2)

The Court’s description of the Complaint is pretty damning. But the Court does not find that the poor use of statistics in the Complaint is fatal to all of its claims.

Here are some highlights of the Court’s assessment of the Complaint:

  • “this Court does not find that the Analysis, as described in the Complaint, is such obvious junk research that it fails to constitute relevant factual allegations which, considered along with the other factual allegations in the Complaint, make plausible certain of the assertions of misrepresentation.” (8)
  • “The Complaint alleges that Defendants knowingly misrepresented that they would properly transfer title to the underlying mortgage loans to the particular trusts. The sole factual allegation made in support is: ‘Prudential’s forensic loan-level analysis revealed that across the Offerings Prudential tested, 43% of the Mortgage Loans were not properly assigned to the Trusts.’ Yes, if true, that is an astonishing fact– but there is not even a suggestion in the Complaint of a theory of how this gives rise to the inference of a knowing misrepresentation.” (13)
  • “The Complaint has so little explanation of the AVM [automated valuation model] methodology that this Court has no idea of how the computer used what information to generate property appraisals.” (15)

Notwithstanding the Court’s critique, it ends up finding the Complaint persuasive in the main:

The claim that Defendants’ representations about the underwriting practices and standards used in the issuance of the underlying mortgage loans were fraudulent because of a systemic abandonment of such underwriting standards is perhaps the central claim in this case. in brief, this Court has carefully examined the Complaint and finds that it states an abundance of factual allegations supporting this claim. (21)

The drafters of the complaint might reckon, ‘no harm no foul’ from the Court’s conclusion. But the rest of us might better see this as their having dodged a bullet, a bullet that the Plaintiffs’ attorneys shot at themselves. Mark Twain had said that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Not sure what he would have said about those in this Complaint — damned statistics?