Last week was a good week for the Colorado Bankers Association. Earlier in the week, the Colorado Supreme Court stopped two potential ballot initiatives – Amendment 94, which would authorize municipalities to own and operate banks, and Amendment 95, which would create a state bank. Then, on Friday, the proponents of Initiative 84 aka “the foreclosure proposal” halted their campaign – and that was the biggie.
Initiative 84 has been championed by a group called the Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC), which had closely aligned itself with the Occupy movement. According to its web site, the CPC is “one of Colorado's most successful non-profit advocate organizations, credited with major victories in our focus areas of civil, social, racial, health and economic justice.”
The initiative would have piled on senseless paperwork and additional regulation to the already paperwork-intensive foreclosure process, while doing nothing to actually stop foreclosures in Colorado.
A letter from the CBA forwarded to the Peak noted, “[CBA] believe they realized early that they lacked funding, that the Denver Post started to report accurately the documentation we must provide, and that the CPC proposal was flawed.”
In fact, the proposal was flawed as its unintended consequences were serious. According to the CBA Fact Sheet on Amendment 84, the initiative would have been damaging:
“[The consequences of this initiative] will prevent homebuyers from taking advantage of low real estate prices and low interest rates, destroy 1000s of jobs and small businesses, depress property values, and slow the real estate recovery. It creates Colorado’s own recession.”
Colorado already has significant issues in the housing market. In fact, foreclosure web site RealtyTrac showed that Colorado foreclosed one house for every 677 properties in May, which places Colorado in the top 15 states for foreclosure by rate.
This is yet another attempt by liberals to blame the wrong people and enact the wrong policy to a problem created by them. A June 2012 Congressional Report by NeighborWorks America, a foreclosure mitigation organization, noted that “the percentage of homeowners stating their primary reason for facing foreclosure is unemployment or underemployment is now 62 percent, up from 41 percent in October 2008.”
Another day in 2012, another loss for the progressive coalition in Colorado. Their big government bank shot met the fate it deserved.