The Chasm Between Words and Deeds: Lenders Not Modifying Loans as They Say to Avoid Foreclosures

Lenders began foreclosure proceedings on nearly 60,000 Californians in August alone. The consequences of these growing foreclosures are being felt by families who have lost their main asset and residence, neighborhoods that suffer lower property values, local governments that incur increasing costs and decreasing tax revenue, and the broader California economy which is heavily dependent on the housing market. Yet a key question remains -- is foreclosure the only option?Approximately two million loans are facing rising interest rate resets in the U.S. over the next two years, and many borrowers will be unable to meet their increased mortgage payment. Over 500,000 Californians may be at risk of foreclosure. For many of these borrowers, perhaps the best they can hope for is that they will be able to negotiate with their loan servicer for a loan modification, which would make the terms of the loan more affordable to them.The good news is that servicers routinely say they want to negotiate loan modifications and keep borrowers in their homes. The bad news is that anecdotes and data suggest that these loan modifications are not really occurring.CRC surveyed 33 of the roughly 80 mortgage counseling agencies across the state which are certified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to assist borrowers at risk of foreclosure. Mortgage counseling agencies are often the only place for borrowers to turn when they are faced with foreclosure. Counselors help borrowers understand their options and often act as intermediaries between borrowers and their lenders. The groups that responded to this CRC survey served approximately 9,800 consumers, including nearly 3,800 consumers through in-person meetings, in the month of August alone. Sadly, they reported that the most common outcomes for these borrowers were foreclosures and short sales, both of which result in home loss. The body of the report includes key findings, as well as recommendations for lenders and policy maker

Chasm Between Words and Deeds IX: Bank Violations Hurt Hardest Hit Communities

CRC's ninth survey of 84 housing counselors and legal service providers reveals that banks are violating several consumer protections that were mandated by the $26 billion National Mortgage Settlement (NMS) and the California Homeowners Bill of Rights. In addition, the survey reveals that bank practices continue to disproportionately affect disadvantaged and hard-hit communities including limited English proficient (LEP) borrowers, widows, and people with disabilities

Yeast Prion Variants as Models of the Phenotypic and Pathological Consequences of Amyloid Polymorphism

Protein aggregation is the hallmark of protein conformational disorders such as Alzheimer\u27s disease and prion diseases. Prions are infectious proteins that propagate a self- templating amyloid structure, and have become a model for studying these diseases. Interestingly, a single protein can form a variety of distinct amyloid structures, a phenomenon referred to as amyloid polymorphism. In prion diseases, these different structures, called prion strains, dictate variation in pathology. However, the underlying basis for how structural variation modulates pathology remains unclear. Yeast prions have been a valuable model for studying protein conformational disorders. Prion proteins endogenous to yeast similarly misfold and form different self-propagating prion strains (called variants) that modulate cellular phenotypes. Additionally, in both humans and yeast, molecular chaperones act to process misfolded substrates. Here, I explore the interplay between molecular chaperones and prion variants and reveal novel determinants for how distinct aggregate structures can dictate phenotype. Studies of the [PSI+] prion have served as the foundation for the biophysical analysis of prion strains for several years. I applied this knowledge to prion variants of another prion, [RNQ+]. I found a surprising diversity in the sequence elements that are required to maintain different [RNQ+] variants. Interestingly, I also found evidence to suggest that the prion conformation dictates the availability of interaction sites for chaperones. Moreover, different domains of the Hsp40 Sis1 are important for maintaining particular prion variants. In fact, Sis1 and its human homolog have distinct prion conformer selectivity, suggesting that the selectivity of Hsp40s has changed throughout evolution. I also apply the concept of amyloid polymorphism to examine mutations in the human Hsp40 DNAJB6 that cause limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 1D (LGMD1D). Using a chimeric protein of DNAJB6 and Sis1, I found that LGMD1D mutations impaired the propagation of prion conformers in a manner that depended on both the conformation and mutation. Additionally, while other functions of Sis1 were unaffected, over-expression of these mutants caused Hsp70-dependent cellular toxicity. These data show that impairing chaperone- mediated processing of particular substrate conformers may be one mechanism involved in the development of chaperonopathies. Taken together, this dissertation highlights the complexity underlying the impact of amyloid polymorphism on dictating phenotypic diversity, and shows how amyloid conformation is an important variable when studying the pathogenesis of protein conformational disorders

Who Really Gets Higher Cost Home Loans: 2006. Home Loan Disparities By Income, Race and Ethnicity of Borrowers and Neighborhoods in 14 California Communities in 2005

Homeownership remains the primary path to wealth building for most Californians. With accumulated home equity comes the chance to finance an education, start a business, prepare for retirement, or pass on wealth to children and grandchildren.Higher-cost home loans frustrate this vision. An entire industry has sprung up that offers higher-cost, or subprime, loans to consumers who are thought not to qualify for lowercost prime loans. Higher-cost home loans carry higher interest rates and fees, forcing consumers to pay more to meet often increasing monthly mortgage obligations. Homeowners who face a greater burden in making mortgage payments will have a greater likelihood of falling behind and possibly losing their homes to foreclosure.Consumers who must spend more money on housing costs have less money to meet basic necessities, cover routine home maintenance, and respond to emergencies that may arise. Entire communities suffer when homeowners: have less money to support local businesses, are unable to make needed home repairs that uplift neighborhoods, and lose their homes to foreclosure which can lower neighborhood property values and increase costs to local municipalities

Points of Stasis in the 1960 and 2000 Presidential Debates

The clash component of a presidential debate sets it apart from other types of campaign messages because the candidates are faced with a potential for “imminent rebuttal” not found in other types of messages, such as television spots or stump speeches. This study is a rhetorical analysis of the 1960 and 2000 presidential debates and attempts to identify the specific points of stasis (clash) where two arguments meet. These points of stasis are labeled in the classic rhetorical theory literature as conjectural, qualitative, definitional, and translative. The study tests the application of these categories as a precursor to future research employing content analytic methods

Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age

At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed ""death,"" Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates

From Foreclosure to Redlining: How America's Largest Financial Institutions Devastated California Communities

After saturating neighborhoods of predominantly black and Latino residents with high-cost, often predatory lending throughout the subprime boom, banks have failed at preventing foreclosures while returning to high and disparate rates of loan denial for applicants of color, according to a new report by the California Reinvestment Coalition. Based on original research using lending and loan modification data that have been largely inaccessible and seldom analyzed, the report looks at how banks, including the largest financial institutions, have acted in five California cities (Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, and Stockton) over the last three years. What the data indicate is an alarming trend of dispossession in neighborhoods with high concentrations of African American and Latino residents. Not only have these areas received a devastating amount of predatory home loans -- and subsequent defaults -- but they also receive markedly low numbers of loan modifications and an accompanying bigger drop in the origination of new prime loans than other neighborhoods. Key findings include: Lenders saturated California neighborhoods with high-cost loans: For example, in Oakland, the Big Bank Lenders made 70% of all their high-cost loans in neighborhoods predominantly of color while making just over 40% of their lower-cost prime loans in these same neighborhoods. Unsustainable loans created concentrated foreclosures: In each of the five survey cities, foreclosures disproportionately affected neighborhoods of color. In Los Angeles, zip codes with 80% or more residents of color contained over 63% of the city's housing units but suffered over 90% of its foreclosures. Lenders fail to work with families to prevent foreclosures: Sample loan level data, representing one-sixth of all mortgages in foreclosure and 20% of all loan modifications, show that from December 2008 to November 2009, Sacramento and San Diego saw fewer than 1,000 permanent modifications, Oakland had only 372, and Los Angeles only 2,326. Re-redlining is occurring as lenders deny credit to communities most affected by bad bank practices: Neighborhoods of color saw a dramatic decrease in lower-cost prime loans in 2008: There were stunning drop-offs from 2006 to 2008 in Oakland, which went from 3,901 prime loans to 1,301; and Los Angeles, which went from 17,615 prime loans to 4,623

Heterologous prion-forming proteins interact to cross-seed aggregation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

AbstractThe early stages of protein misfolding remain incompletely understood, as most mammalian proteinopathies are only detected after irreversible protein aggregates have formed. Cross-seeding, where one aggregated protein templates the misfolding of a heterologous protein, is one mechanism proposed to stimulate protein aggregation and facilitate disease pathogenesis. Here, we demonstrate the existence of cross-seeding as a crucial step in the formation of the yeast prion [PSI+], formed by the translation termination factor Sup35. We provide evidence for the genetic and physical interaction of the prion protein Rnq1 with Sup35 as a predominant mechanism leading to self-propagating Sup35 aggregation. We identify interacting sites within Rnq1 and Sup35 and determine the effects of breaking and restoring a crucial interaction. Altogether, our results demonstrate that single-residue disruption can drastically reduce the effects of cross-seeding, a finding that has important implications for human protein misfolding disorders.</jats:p

CENTER OF PRESSURE AND JOINT TORQUE ESTIMATION FOR SINGLE LEG SLACKLINE BALANCING USING MODEL-BASED OPTIMIZATION

Being similar to tightrope walking, slacklining has become very popular among athletes and physiotherapists to practice and improve balancing capabilities. For flat ground static balance the center of pressure is often used to quantify how stable a subject is. In this work we present a method to reconstruct the center of pressure and the joint torques from pure motion capture data for motions that don’t allow for force plate measurements. We demonstrate the application to a subject balancing on a slackline. We create a subject-specific 3D-model and perform a least-squares fit to the recorded reference motion by formulation and solution of an optimal control problem. From the resulting forces we can reconstruct the center of pressure dynamics and quantify how stable the subject is on a slackline. The joint torques allow for further insight into the balancing strategies applied