FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
From NPR News, this is NEWS AND NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. I'm sitting in for Ed Gordon.
Today, a word of warning as we continue our real estate series. When it comes to buying a home, not all loans are created equal. African-American buyers are often charged exorbitant interest rates. Loans are flipped again and again between lenders. Some lenders charge fees for service never rendered. That cycle is called predatory lending, and Barbara Anderson knows the story well.
She, her husband and their four kids moved into a spacious Cleveland home. When her sister died of cancer, Barbara took in four more children. No problem. They had plenty of room, or so she thought. Soon after losing her sister, she learned she might lose her house too. Here's Barbara Anderson in her own words.
Ms. BARBARA ANDERSON: I can remember so clearly as we went to go sign the papers that one of the lines in it said that they reserve the right to sell the loan. And at that time that was so unimportant to me. I was thinking okay, so I've got to pay it wherever it goes, so it really didn't matter to me where it was being sold to.
But in the process the loan was sold at least four times, and each time it developed more and more problems. In the end it ended up being sold to a servicer. Things just began to fall apart. We weren't able to reach the servicer. The servicer began to complain that they had not received a payment or they had not received the payment on time. It was just one thing after another.
After just calling and complaining - wait a minute, we made our last payment to this particular person, you need to check with them. It always came back to more work for us, what we were supposed to do. And the fees were mounting up. I mean, we were experiencing at the end of the month $50, $75 even a hundred dollars and more.
And we knew that most of these fees were bogus fees, because we had made the payments. You began to respond the way most women do who are in abused situations. They begin and take and make it there fault. I began to feel like well, maybe, if I send the payment out on the 15th instead of the 10th, or maybe if I send the payment out certified, maybe if I send the payment out registered, maybe if I mail it from this mailbox instead of that mailbox.
And I began to do all kinds of different things just to try to make it right, but it never was right. And the fees began to mount up to the point that we where eventually forced into foreclosure and then into bankruptcy.
You began to think that if I can get someone to understand it they will see it my way and then they will correct it, because for me it was just a matter of logic. There was this time where I did get a live person after playing - what's that game that you play on the telephone where you're just out there in the atmosphere going round and round pushing 1, 2, 6, 9 - and that person when I began to explain what I was experiencing, seemed to understand it clearly. I remember her saying, oh this is terrible. How long have you been experiencing this? Oh no, we've got to really get to the bottom of this. And I was so excited. I was delighted. I was hysterical. It was one of those times when you just feel like dancing and saying, I won, I won. I got it. I got a live person and now all of this is going to be resolved. All of this is going to go away, and now I can go on with my life.
And then the next time I called, no one knew what I was talking about.
After a certain period of time it was evident my husband would not be able to continue to work, and that whole responsibility would become mine. And that's what led me to East Side Organizing Project. I kind of stumbled across it in my searching for someone. And then on that particular day I walked into that meeting and there were hundreds of us there. I saw a banker there. She had experienced this same thing. I saw housewives there. I saw construction workers there. There was such a sense of comfort and peace to finally realize that I was not crazy.
CHIDEYA: Cleveland's East Side Organizing Project eventually helped Barbara and her husband save their home.
The Andersons moved their loan to a local bank. No more payments supposedly lost in the mail, no more impersonal phone calls. If Barbara has a question, all she's got to do is walk down the street. But while her story has a happy ending, many do not. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.