HUD and Gary Human Relations Commission
Team Up to Save the Home of Gary Family

We will call her Mrs. X. She and her late husband had managed, after many years, to pay off the mortgage on their tidy home in Gary, Indiana. But huge medical bills from her husband's final illness and her own medical expenses caused Mrs. X, a sixty year old with diabetes and limited eyesight, to take out a new mortgage. That is when the trouble began. The new mortgage payment based on an interest rate of nearly 16 percent was too much for her to handle while getting by on her modest Social Security income and caring for her daughter and granddaughter.

She filed for bankruptcy, but she also filed a discrimination complaint with the Chicago HUD Office of Fair Housing, alleging that the lender, Bank One, and Loan Servicer, Liberty Lending, had discriminated against her based upon race. It was during the course of an investigation by HUD and the Gary Human Relations Commission (GHRC), (a HUD Fair Housing Assistance Program Partner) that HUD investigator, Robert P. Sullivan, and GHRC investigator Melody Tukes, discovered that the family was about to lose its home to foreclosure.

Sullivan negotiated with Bank One and Liberty Lending to find a solution to Mrs. X's dilemma, brought on by the fact that she never understood that the high costs of the new loan were way beyond what she could afford on her fixed income. Tukes and Sullivan convinced the lenders that keeping Mrs. X in the family home would be the right thing to do. They accomplished this, by reducing the loan's principal by $10,000, dramatically reducing the interest rate to 6 percent, forgiving overdue interest charges of some $10,000, and waiving fees on the new mortgage. Mrs. X remains a homeowner today because of the work of HUD's Chicago Fair Housing Office, the Gary Human Relations Commission, and the willingness of the two lenders to take another look and do the right thing.