This week Mayor Bloomberg is announcing the NYC Service Initiative, which aims to provide free legal services to homeowners in danger of foreclosure. In an announcement yesterday, the Mayor's office said it would "increase the availability and effectiveness of free legal representation for those facing foreclosure by training and dispatching 300 volunteer attorneys to expand legal services provided by non-profit organizations."
The city is currently looking for volunteers to either be stationed at courthouses to counsel homeowners about which legal process to engage in or to be directly matched with individual homeowners. It's coupled with an initiative to provide low-income families with free financial advice. The NY Times reports that the program, run by the Department of Consumer Affairs, has met with over 4,000 people so far. DCA Commissioner Jonathan B. Mintz stresses the importance of financial counseling, "You need to be able to sit down with a professional who is going to look at your financial problems, at your documents, and help you through the crisis, like folks in higher-income tax brackets do."
The program has also been attracting talent from bigger pools such as one woman who left her job at American International Group to oversee the OFE. And Juan Maldonado now works for nonprofit The Financial Clinic after a stint at Lehman Brothers before it crashed. After growing up on food stamps in the Bronx, he knows where most of his clients are coming from, “I learned the value of money very early on...I also learned that saving isn’t something poor people care about much.”
