Mortgage Foreclosures in Atlanta: Patterns and Policy Issues

Metropolitan Atlanta is experiencing a foreclosure boom as the number of failed mortgages more than doubled in less than five years, between 2000 and 2005. These foreclosures impose significant costs not only on borrowers and lenders, but also on municipal governments, neighboring homeowners and others with a financial interest in nearby properties. As a result, foreclosure avoidance strategies must involve not only federal, state and local public agencies, but also responsible mortgage industry officials, consumer groups, and community-based, not-for profit organizations. This report was commissioned by Doug Dylla at NeighborWorks America to help build awareness of foreclosure problems and craft a comprehensive foreclosure-avoidance strategy for metropolitan Atlanta. The work presented here serves as a companion to the Foreclosure Prevention Forum cosponsored by NeighborWorks America and the Atlanta Federal Reserve on May 23, 2005. The forum brought together more than 150 leaders from the mortgage industry, state and local government, the advocacy community, and academic and policy researchers. These participants generated a variety of collaborative approaches to address issues related to mortgage failures and foreclosures in the Atlanta region.The report was written and researched by Mark Duda and William Apgar. It expands on research presented by Duda at the forum and is intended to characterize the current situation with respect to mortgage failures in metropolitan Atlanta, as well as previous research completed by the authors on foreclosure avoidance in Chicago and Los Angeles. The foreclosure data used in this report were generously provided by EquiSystems, LLC, producer of the Atlanta Foreclosure Report

Identification of an Alternative Exon in a GABA Receptor Gene

The central dogma of biology states that DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which is then translated into proteins. In order for translation to occur, pre-mRNAs first must be processed. In pre-mRNA processing, parts of the nucleotide sequence called introns are spliced out from the transcript, so the final mRNA is made up entirely of exons. In alternative splicing, an exon is spliced out of the pre-mRNA transcript much like an intron. An mRNA transcript produced as a result of alternative splicing could produce a different protein than the mRNA without alternative splicing. Alternative splicing of an mRNA transcript could also result in a premature termination codon (PTC) within the mRNA sequence. This premature termination codon causes translation to stop before the full transcript has been translated, resulting in a truncated protein. Nonsense Mediated Decay (NMD) functions by degrading mRNA transcripts containing a PTC. NMD occurs during translation by an intricate series of protein-protein and protein-mRNA interactions that detect a PTC and result in the cleavage of PTC-containing mRNAs. We discovered an alternative exon in a zebrafish GABA receptor gene that leads to a PTC when excluded from the final mRNA and investigated the role of NMD in degrading the PTC-containing transcript

The 30th anniversary of the Community Reinvestment Act: restructuring the CRA to address the mortgage finance revolution

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977

The Municipal Cost of Foreclosure: A Chicago Case Study

The recent rise in nonprime mortgage foreclosures has opened a new and costly chapter in many of the nation's most distressed urban neighborhoods. Particularly problematic is the fact that today's foreclosures impose significant costs not only on borrowers and lenders, but also on municipal governments, neighboring homeowners and others with a financial interest in nearby properties. While there is an extensive literature on the impact that delinquency, default, and foreclosure have on lenders, borrowers, and other entities that are direct parties to the mortgage transaction in question, the costs that these mortgage failures impose on municipalities and other third parties are far less well understood. This is due to two factors. First, municipal and other third party costs are difficult to identify, and therefore often go undetected. Second, even where identified, the activities that generate costs often blend in with other governmental functions, or are otherwise difficult to quantify, reinforcing the tendency for them to remain invisible.This study attempts to fill that void. Using the City of Chicago as a case in point, this study presents a conceptual framework that makes explicit the various costs of foreclosure, especially as they relate to local governments and courts. By carefully reviewing the foreclosure process as it plays out in Chicago, the paper isolates 26 separate costs incurred for the provision of 'foreclosure related services.' These costs reflect actions undertaken by 15 separate governmental units that are part of the overall municipal infrastructure underlying the foreclosure process. While in some cases these municipal activities are limited to simple and relatively inexpensive ministerial duties of agencies like the Recorder of Deeds, in more complex foreclosure scenarios these municipal costs can reach tens of thousands of dollars. In extreme cases, the concentrated foreclosures can put downward pressure on area property values and indirectly rob area homeowners of hundreds of thousands of dollars of home equity

The Disabled Child

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children’s exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class. By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues, “special needs” parental memoirs reinforce ableism at the same time that they’re writing against it

Teacher Evaluation in the Christian School Setting: A Program Evaluation of the T.E.S.T. Program

Since the early 1800s, various educational experts and philosophers have contributed to an ever-growing database regarding teacher evaluation. This valuable research has been instrumental in shaping teacher evaluation in our public schools as we know it today. While much research has taken place in public schools, there has been limited research conducted in the private Christian school setting. This research was in response to the limited research data available and sought to identify best practices regarding teacher evaluation in the Christian school setting. The T.E.S.T. (Teacher Evaluation, Support, and Training) program is a teacher evaluation program specifically designed for implementation in the Christian school setting. A program evaluation of the T.E.S.T. program was conducted in a Christian school following the CIPP model of evaluation. Findings from this study support the conclusion that teachers at Christian School A perceived that the T.E.S.T. program had a positive impact on their professional growth while also providing a means of teacher accountability in the Christian school setting. The findings also demonstrated that the T.E.S.T. program had a more neutral impact on the spiritual life of individual teachers. It is recommended that school administrators annually review their school’s evaluation program and provide teachers adequate time and resources needed to fully participate in the evaluation process

Biocultural Approaches: Opportunities for Building More Inclusive Environmental Governance

A significant portion of the world’s remaining biodiversity and agrobiodiversity is in the hands of local and indigenous communities who tend to be politically marginalised and thus excluded from formal environmental governance schemes. In spite of the growth of interactional approaches to environmental governance, experiences of indigenous and local communities suggest that challenges remain in shifting mindsets and practices away from structured and formal mechanisms to understand and support local environmental governance models that are already delivering significant global environmental outcomes. This paper explores biocultural approaches to environmental governance and conservation through analysing two cases: (i) Indigenous Biocultural Territories and their emphasis on in-situ conservation of biocultural heritage; and (ii) Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas, based on community and activist work on biodiversity conservation across the world. They show that it is possible to create space for locally driven environmental governance while at the same time pursuing interactional and inclusive approaches within national contexts.Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperatio

The Disabled Child

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children’s exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class. By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues, “special needs” parental memoirs reinforce ableism at the same time that they’re writing against it

Educational Leadership and its Impact on Life in Schools: A Critical Interpretation

In this critical hermeneutical study, the historical and current literature in educational leadership was systematically investigated. The epistemological, methodological, and ideological issues in the theoretical history were analyzed to determine their impact on the development of educational leadership as a field of study. Two literature reviews were conducted to demonstrate how the field conceptualized its impact on life in schools. These literature reviews also allowed for a connection of the present state of the field to its historical foundation. The current ideologies driving the field of educational leadership were examined within the epistemological and methodological foci of the literature. It was found that the ideological history of the field, based in scientific management and efficiency, has manifested itself in the current accountability polices and impacted what counts as knowledge in the current research done in educational leadership