Mortgage servicers -- entities that manage home mortgage loans -- halted foreclosures throughout the country in September 2010, finding that documents required to be provided to courts in some states may have been improperly signed or notarized. In addition, academics and court cases are raising questions over whether foreclosures are being brought properly because of concerns over how loans were transferred into mortgage-backed securities. This report examined: (1) the extent to which federal laws address mortgage servicers' foreclosure procedures and federal agencies' past oversight; (2) federal agencies' current oversight and future oversight plans; and (3) the potential impact of these issues on involved parties. Illus. A print on demand report.

From 2007 to 2012, almost five percent of American adults—about ten million people—lost their homes because they could not make mortgage payments. The scale of this home mortgage crisis is unprecedented—and it's not over. Foreclosures still displace more American homeowners every year than at any time before the twenty-first century. The dispossession and forced displacement of American families affects their health, educational success, and access to jobs. It continues to block any real recovery in the hardest-hit communities. While we now know a lot about how this crisis affected the global economy, we still know very little about how it affected the people who lost their homes. Foreclosed America offers the first representative portrait of those people—who they are, how and where they live after losing their homes, and what they have to say about their finances, their neighborhoods, and American politics. It is a sobering picture of Americans down on their luck, and of a crisis that is testing American democracy.

Foreclosed explains the rise of high-risk lending in the 1990s and early 200s and why these newer types of loans--and their associated regulatory infrastructure--failed in substantial ways, leading to the economic collapse of 2008.