Turn on your television this holiday season and chances are the movie "It's A Wonderful Life" will be playing on some channel. This classic film has come to embody that sense of community and caring for one's neighbors often referred to as the "holiday spirit."
You remember the plot line. The bad guy, Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, schemes to extract rents from slum housing and take over the Building and Loan, run by good guy George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart. George's bank makes loans to families who otherwise wouldn't be able to get them - low-income families, families of color, people who, in his words, "do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community."
As far as we know, George doesn't sneak escalation clauses into his mortgages or base his business model on getting big fees for foreclosing on those families off-screen. Still, he makes a living. He is not rich but he can care for his family and keep a roof over their heads.
Fast-forward to Christmas 2007, when 2 million Americans are facing the very real possibility they will not be able to do even that because they took out mortgages on exploitative terms. From January to November of this year 15 out of every 1,000 households in Utah received a pre-foreclosure warning notice. That was just the continuation of a miserable trend. In 2006, in Weber County alone, there were 36 pre-foreclosure notices sent for every 1,000 households.
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