Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

TRANSPORTATION, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - July 24, 2007)

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Mr. GILLMOR. Mr. Chairman, I will enter my statement in the Record, and I am going to be very brief.

I rise in support of the amendment. I want to commend the gentleman, Mr. Turner, for taking leadership on this amendment. He has a record of being very active, when he was mayor of Dayton, trying to deal with the problems of predatory lending. And I want to commend Mrs. Biggert for her work on this, as well as her work on financial literacy.

Ohio, unfortunately, has been one of the leaders in foreclosures. And I want to point out one of the things that we found about foreclosures nationally and also in the Midwest, most of those foreclosures have not come as a result of loans by federally regulated banks and savings and loans. They have come from those lenders and mortgage brokers who are not regulated by the Federal Government but by the States, who have not done their job.

I called together a conference, I guess about six weeks ago, of Ohio financial institutions, of regulators, of community groups, to talk about the foreclosure crisis and what effectively could be done. And I was surprised that the consensus that came out of that meeting of all those groups was that the single most important thing you could do would be to provide for housing counseling. And the people who did have counseling had a very low foreclosure rate. And all this bill would do would be to provide a modest increase in counseling. We will get a tremendous benefit and a decrease in foreclosures as a result of it.

I think this amendment presents a choice. You have two agencies, and you have a choice between them. You've got the Inspector General and the Housing Counseling Program. Which one are you going to fund level to last year and which one are you going to increase? And I would say to you, if you look at what's going on in the housing market, it is pretty clear that if there is to be a priority between those two, it ought to be to put more money into counseling so that you can save people and their homes.

I also point out that the Senate has already passed language that goes much further than ours. So I would ask for support of the Turner-Biggert-Gillmor amendment.

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Today I rise in strong support of the Turner-Biggert-Gillmor amendment. Not a day goes by that we do not see reports of another facet of the growing turmoil in our housing markets. For far too long, Ohioans and others have been subject to predatory lenders, loose underwriting standards and too few housing counseling opportunities. My colleagues Mr. Turner, Ms. Biggert and many others have explored these issues for years and have worked tirelessly to find solutions to the problem of foreclosure. Mr. Turner was active in efforts to prevent predatory lending as the mayor of Dayton. My colleague Ranking Member Biggert has been a leader in efforts to promote financial literacy. Housing counseling is a critical element to helping Americans stay in their home. During a recent summit I put together on Ohio's foreclosure crisis, regulators, lenders and housing advocates from Ohio alike presented an opinion that a significant number of homeowners were not able to tell you whether they had a fixed-rate or an adjustable-rate mortgage. Today, too many find out the hard way when their loan resets. It is expected that some $600 billion in subprime loans will reset in the next 18 months and the fallout could be devastating to many of our constituents.

The consensus of all those attending was that the most important single thing we could do to prevent foreclosure was to provide counseling before people actually entered into a mortgage. Housing counseling will not be a silver bullet, nor will it prevent someone currently in the foreclosure process from losing their home. That being said, there is a clear need for additional federal resources in this area and would hope my colleagues will support this small increase.

Legislation I recently introduced with Representatives Bachus, Pryce and others would authorize some $100 million per year in housing counseling, a more than doubling of FY2007 enacted levels. The Senator has proposed a comparable increase. While I hope this stand-alone legislation is quickly adopted by the House, this amendment assures that moving forward, Congress is in favor of additional resources for housing counseling.

I urge my colleagues to accept this modest increase in funding so that our constituents can keep their homes once they realize the American dream of homeownership.

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Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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