Best.
Fucking.
City.
Council.
Person.
Ever.
And she hasn't officially started yet.

Kshama Sawant.

Defending high property values in Seattlegrad.

Just as we knew she would...

@2 becuase BoA is going to sell it at below market rates, and/or the new owner is not going to rent it out at the new sky-high standard.

I think she just won my vote for her reelection.

Bank of America is horrible. We have our mortgage through them, and have always made our payment in full and on time, but one month BofA decided we hadn't, and sent us papers saying they intended to foreclose. We placed several calls, where everyone we spoke to said that they could see that the payment was there and it was the bank's error, and said it was supposedly fixed, but the next month, they refused our payment, saying we hadn't paid the previous month, and they would only accept the last month's and current month's payment. Plus, they reported us to the credit bureaus.

I finally got myself into a girdle and heels and went to the Columbia City branch, where I politely refused to leave until it was resolved. The woman I spoke to couldn't have been more professional and kind. It took the better part of two hours, but we got it straightened out and she got BofA to write correction letters to the credit agencies. She left the bank shortly thereafter, and I dearly hope it wasn't because of that.

We were lucky because there are Bank of America branches all over Seattle, but what if you live in some godforsaken town in the middle nowhere and they hold your mortgage and try stuff like that? Do you have to travel a few hundred miles on the hope that someone at that distant branch will be as good as that woman?

I see the BofA protesters almost every night when I get off the train at Beacon Hill, and am so pleased. We are almost paid off, and I cannot wait until the day when I no longer have to deal with that sleazy organization. Knowing that Sawant is there makes me so happy that I voted for her.

@6, do you mean the red China which basically owns the US? The red China that is busily buying the rest of the world? The red China that makes just about everything we use? That one?

If Ken Mehlman doesn't like a city with a socialist council member, he can go back to Alabama where he belongs.

Conlin is infinitely more the city councilmember than Sawant is (for about the next month).

Makes sense the Ken Mehlman would say that. I think he's posted a lot of racist anti-black stuff, so why wouldn't he hate Asians, too?

Conlin may collect his salary for another three weeks, but he's finished.

Ken Mehlman is a satirist. Google the name.

Much as I dislike Bank of America, I would have to see the refinancing history of this property before I could get behind the SAFE campaign. If, like so many others, Mair used her home as a piggy bank to finance her career as a "human rights journalist," then she's pretty much on her own, as far as I'm concerned.

Following 13, the housing crisis is probably the least clear-cut but most partisan-polarized issue of our time. Most opinions are unequivocal, but it's very clear that while the hordes of bankers should be in jail, hundreds of thousands of individuals leveraged the crooked system to the hilt and are working to avoid personal responsibility. I know some of these people, all, you might not be surprised, with a stripe of tea party politics. They don't see the inconsistency of asking (ultimately) tax payers to pay their mortgages - "gotta' play the game that's in fronta ya, right?" As. As a person who's made conservative financial choices, under-borrowed, never even thought of dipping into equity, these people make me angry.

I also feel for people who got genuinely swindled or forced into unrealistic borrowing by dire need (health crises, etc ... you can almost select out this group by way of race/ethnicity, btw, which is an outrage in itself). We should help those folks. But just the opportunity to over borrow being present to me is not a "cause" that can be fully ascribed to the banks. Those who were lured to stupidity by their own greed should bear the consequence.

In my day BofA was known as the Bank of Apartheid.

@12
thanks for the tip
Dominic's photo brother and Ansel Herz might be interested in the 'iso 50' film that was used for Ken Mehlman's professional photography studio photos.
http://kenmehlman.com/

@12: Correction. Ken Mehlman is a troll with the name of a douchebag.

@15
"in my day" - love it
oh please, this is America, feel free to type whatever. I'd love hearing more about the customs of you and your ilk back "in your day." i.e. did you crowd in front of the Zenith black&white waiting for Howdy Doody to come on the screen?

@15 I'm
sorry, you seem to come from a more sophisticated family than Howdy Doody watchers.
Were your parents giving you lessons on the structure of carbon? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co…
In any case "Bank of Apartheid" is cute. Sounds like a witty saying a paid writer for the Stranger would come up with. Cheers.

It was called "Bank of Apartheid" because of it's support of South Africa, silly.

But here's why it's important to put pressure on B of A regardless: they are simply too big, in a practical sense (too many conflicting computer systems, too many call centers, etc), and need to be broken up for the good of the economy.

I got rid of my Skank of America accounts years ago and moved to a Credit Union.

@14, I tend to agree, but the banks should have done a much better job at putting loan applicants through proper due process before allowing them to take the loans in the first place.

In any situation there are going to be people who game/scam the system but it's inappropriate to assume that number makes up a majority or even a large minority of people. The banks are the primary culprit with many homeowners only helping enable the disaster.

The city needs to focus on creating more affordable housing, which is good for workers and employers alike. This whole notion that people need to be kept in houses that they cannot afford is both unsustainable and damaging to the market. Right now single family housing prices are artificially high because demand is outstripping supply.

Last I checked, there was tons of abandoned and/or unused properties along two major transit corridors (Aurora and MLK). The city should create a non-profit to buy up those properties and start erecting as many apartments as possible.

Stop with this litigious bullshit that only serves to put money in the pockets of attorneys. If this city is going to have a $15 minimum wage, then it also needs an abundant supply of $850/month apartments that those workers can afford to live in, along transit routes where they can get back and forth from work in 30 minutes or less.

I voted for Ms. Sawant but she needs to quit with her antics that serve to feed her anti-profit base and start focusing on real solutions that will have a real benefit to the citizens of this city. We need affordable housing and we need it NOW.

$15.00 still doesn't pay monthly rent in Seattle, what's the average rent here? $1000 if you're lucky?

Increasing the minimum wage without a plan to provide a substantial amount of affordable housing for the poor and the median income folks is meaningless

@31 I'll vote for any candidate that swings the pendulum to the left, even if I don't agree with 100% of their policies. Better that than allow the reich-wing cro-magnon corporate assholes that you obviously support. Can't wait to relegate you into history's dustbin.

@33 Conlin spent his entire political career pandering to the moneyed interests in this city, but he was still a lefty, which means @31 would have never supported him. He'd vote for the guy who proclaims his eternal and simultaneous devotion to Ronald Reagan, Supply-Side Jesus, and Ayn Rand.

I hear you @34, just annoys the fuck out of me that, for instance, a PhD holding friend told me in 2007 that "in 3 years I won't be able to pay my [cash out] refi" spent on a new car. I thought he was insane for kicking the can down the road, but guess who was underwater and got restructured 3 years later? We bought that guy a car. Along with that guy I know three other fully cognizant people who knowingly over-borrowed because they wanted more than they could afford and got bailed out. Don't know the breakdown, but probably you're right that consumers who share some fault are relatively rare. Still though I feel like a sucker for doing the "right" thing - probably always a mistake in our corrupt economy.

@36 That might be the same PhD I met who works in research for DARPA while loudly proclaiming himself to be a Reaganite who hates government spending.

Abdicate personal responsibility and rage against corporations or unions, it's the American way.

I'm not saying that 37 - plenty of people got genuinely ganked by the banks. It would just be nice if there was a way to shake the small peas out of the mess and take care of everyone else.

@Catalina: When I moved here from Massachusetts, I went to the bank in Southcenter to close my MA account and move it to WA (The proximity to work, and the fact that they'd been mostly ok to me after they bought the much smaller bank I'd had my account with before is why I was with them.)

A year later I got a call from collections saying I owed money on the MA account which was obviously collecting fees and such since they hadn't actually CLOSED it closed it (and without any action, it stopped being free).

Fortunately a quick call to BoA and I never heard about that issue again, but stuff like that makes me have little sympathy for BoA ever.

I'm a bit of a fence-sitter on the foreclosure issue. I own two lovely rental properties because of foreclosures, but I can tell you from my observations of the properties and conversation with the condo boards that the previous owners were absentee landlords who didn't care one lick about the property...when the value tanked, they walked. I spent the better part of my first month of owning both of them cleaning out serious nasties (everything from trash stuffed in cabinets to icky dishwashers left full of festering dishes to nail polish spilled all over hardwoods), and the associations are happy to have me because I'm local, vet my tenants, pay my fees, and care for the property. On the other hand, I've walked down the street to find a house full of belongings out on the curb because someone found themselves in an emergency and, welp, too bad. Often that person is someone who lived in the house for 10+ years problem-free, and should get some consideration. I mean, as bad as student loans can be, federal student loans come with the ability to forgo payments or make smaller payments for periods of time because of financial hardship. Shouldn't there be *some* kind of provision to help people through periods of financial instability, especially if they've been a "good customer" for a number of years?

As for BOA, well, my original mortgage on my home was with them. I never had any problems, but they sold my mortgage after I made the payments on time and in full for 6 months. They ended up with it again when they took over another lender, and again sold it in just a few months when my payments were always current. Why would they sell a "performing" mortgage, TWICE? Methinks they are being predatory and looking for people likely to default, not someone who under-bought and will NEVER default on her mortgage (barring something REALLY serious...my mortgage is low enough that even unemployment would cover it and THEN (a good bit of...groceries and condo fee, at least) SOME). When I refied a few months ago, my first question to each lender was "how long will you hold my mortgage before you sell it? I'm kind of sick of paying someone different every few months." Most of the lenders told me that as long as it was paid on time on the regular, it was unlikely it would be sold, who the HECK was selling a performing mortgage so often? When I told them, they were universally "yeah, we don't believe in that practice. We're fighting for your business because we believe you are a strong customer, and we want to do business with you in the long term." Told me all I needed to know.