Denver firefighters responded to a house on Thursday night that was “fully involved” in a fire, extinguishing the blaze in the Globeville neighborhood in less than 15 minutes.
Division Chief of Operations Robert Murphy said the house, at 43rd Avenue and Cherokee Street, was vacant and no one was injured in the fire.
Denver Fire crews arrived on scene to find a fully involved house fire in the area of I-25 and I-70. Crews initiated a defensive fire attack on the vacant structure. No injuries. Fire investigators on scene to determine cause. pic.twitter.com/WD5Q8n8hRp
The Denver Fire Department got the call on a one-alarm blaze around 8:40 p.m. Christmas night, Murphy said, and seven trucks and emergency vehicles responded to the scene.
“There was nobody there when we got there,” he said. “We started attacking from the outside. There are still parts of the house standing, but it’s going to have to come down.”
But the new paradigm for fighting these fires contains an inconvenient truth. Most people don’t live in new houses, and most building codes aren’t as strict as California’s. And so, for the large majority of the approximately fifty million U.S. homes in the WUI, fire prevention falls to individual homeowners—it’s voluntary and ad hoc. “The approach that has been taken for the last quarter century has been one of, ‘Hey, something is better than nothing,’ ” Maranghides told me. “And, from a fire perspective, that is absolutely not true. Fire doesn’t work that way.” A homeowner could complete eighty per cent of fire-protection measures, potentially spending many tens of thousands of dollars on retrofits, and lose their house because of the twenty per cent that remains unfinished—in no small part because of uncontrollable, unpredictable embers.
This reality has led Maranghides to a position so logical that it reminded me of Spock, the ultra-rational character from “Star Trek.” For homes to survive fire disasters on their own, he said, people who live on the boundary with wildlands should not only clear sources of fuel from around their properties but also make a hundred per cent of potential home-hardening improvements. Even these extraordinary measures, he went on, are insufficient. No home is an island, and dense housing developments can protect themselves only if every neighbor does the same work. Such recommendations are so stringent that they may seem impossible; some of Maranghides’s colleagues in the fire-prevention world worry that the message will deter the public from trying. “You cannot pick and choose,” Maranghides told me. “The science tells us you have to do everything.”
For much of the twentieth century, forest fires tended to threaten rural communities. Over time, a particular approach to fire prevention emerged: if your house sat on a spacious parcel in or near the woods, you could work to protect it by creating a buffer around it. In the sixties, a California law supported by the state’s fire agency advanced the foundational concept of defensible space, a zone of up to a hundred feet where fuels such as brush and trees are strategically trimmed back and managed. The U.S. Forest Service eventually recommended the practice. But, throughout the decades, housing developments crept toward wildlands, the climate warmed, and fires increasingly escalated into unstoppable urban conflagrations. In the past decade, California’s most destructive fires incinerated more than fifty-seven thousand homes, commercial properties, and other structures. And, when the nearest source of fuel is not the woods but, rather, the house next door, a broader strategy is needed. Houses had to be hardened to make them less likely to go up in flames.
This past spring, I visited Maranghides at the National Fire Research Laboratory, which studies hardening strategies in a hulking, warehouse-like structure on NIST’s campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Enormous ventilation pipes were coiled like snakes on the roof of the building. Maranghides, bespectacled and in jeans, met me in the vestibule, where we grabbed white hard hats. From there, we entered a cavernous room with a reinforced concrete floor. A roughly fifty-square-foot air-exhaust hood—an industrial version of what one finds in home kitchens—hung from the ceiling.
A dozen researchers were gathered around a mockup of a single-story dwelling. A beige façade made from cement fibreboard featured a double-pane slider window, an asphalt-composite shingle roof, and a metal gutter. It was designed to be highly fire-resistant, in keeping with Chapter 7A and the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code. (The house was like a stage set, with scaffolding where the other three walls would have been; sensors tracked metrics such as temperature and heat flux.) But all eyes were focussed on a small shed made from corrugated steel sitting five feet from the house. Its open door, facing the dwelling, revealed stacks of wood inside.
“Stand by for ignition,” a voice announced through a loudspeaker. A man in firefighting gear approached the shed, used a propane torch to set a fire, and walked away. Within minutes, an incandescent blaze was shooting out the door toward the wall. We could hear loud crackling; embers flew about. Soon, orange-red flames began to lick the wall and the roof’s open eaves. Smoke spiralled upward. The window frame, which was made from white vinyl, started melting and then ignited. Around ten minutes into the experiment, the eaves were burning. A glass window pane fell to the ground.
A Wyoming homeowner receives a bizarre letter with no return address from her homeowners association (HOA), questioning her parenting skills over a parking disagreement. Viewers say her response is brilliant.
In a video with over 48,000 views, TikToker Lauren Lynn (@laurenlynn0) explains that she and her husband have three cars: two personal vehicles and his work truck. They park two cars in the driveway and one in the public street parking.
“We haven’t had any issues with the HOA until probably five months ago,” Lynn says. HOAs typically create a list of rules governing a neighborhood and charge dues to all homeowners in the area.
Then she recieved an anonymous letter bashing her for parking one of their cars on the street in front of her house.
She notes that per the HOA rules, cars on the street must be moved every two days.
“So to alleviate that, we switched out his cars. His personal truck he never drives, so we park that in the driveway,” she explains. Her husband parks his work truck in the street because it’s moved every day.
However, the letter criticizes her family for continuing to park in the street, despite following the HOA rules.
In a follow-up video, she shows the letter. It reads, “Your lack of character or concern for the HOA rules is astounding… You are raising your child that rules only matter to others not yourselves.”
How did she respond to the HOA letter?
In response to the letter, Lynn applies for the HOA and receives an acceptance as a board member. She also types up a sarcastic response and posts it on her mailbox.
Her response reads, “I am thrilled to have received your thoughtful letter regarding our vehicle’s parking and the parenting of our son. It’s truly inspiring to know that, in a world filled with chaos, injustice, and fundamental problems, you’ve taken the time to dedicate yourself to the noble cause of ensuring my vehicle’s precise placement.”
It continues, “Please rest assured that your unsolicited critique has been received, reviewed, and will be given the exact amount of attention it deserves… Wishing you all the best in your continued pursuit of vehicular justice.”
While serving on the board, she says she didn’t encounter any problems with her fellow members. She also learns that complaints, such as the one outlined in the letter, have to go through the board. Therefore, the person who wrote the anonymous letter didn’t follow the HOA’s procedures.
She has no idea who wrote the letter until an older woman knocks on her door months later.
What did the older woman say?
In a third video, Lynn shares doorbell camera footage of an older woman standing on her front porch with her and her husband. The woman, who claims she has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years, questions why they leave her husband’s work truck on the street overnight.
Lynn reveals to the woman that she is on the HOA board, which causes the woman to pause in disbelief. She advises the woman to address her concerns directly to the HOA board, rather than confronting her at her home.
The woman claims she was once the chairman of the “covenants committee” and insists that vehicles aren’t supposed to be parked in the street overnight.
Lynn continues to advise the woman to take it up with the HOA or the covenants committee instead of confronting residents.
Suddenly, another man walks up to the porch, becoming confrontational.
“Oh [you’ve lived here] four years? So you have a copy of the ordinance,” he says sarcastically. Lynn and her husband cut him off and question why he is getting involved, wondering if he wrote the letter.
Her husband tells the man to leave the porch. Lynn has not posted any further updates about the HOA saga.
How did viewers react?
In the comments, viewers praise her for her confrontation skills.
“Good for yall for telling them off basically! People like that just have nothing better to do with their day than to bother people about something that isn’t even a problem. And good for your man for telling that guy off,” a commenter says.
“Telling her you’re actually on the HOA board, stepping through the door and putting your arm on the handle was such a baller move,” another remarks.
Others question the HOA’s rule regarding street parking.
“It’s a public street. As long as the vehicle is street legal, it can stay on the street as long as it wants,” one writes.
“The HOA does not own the street and they can not do anything about a vehicle being parked on the street,” another says.
“Is your community gated? If not, its a city street and the HOA cannot restrict street parking,” a third suggests.
Marshall fire victims who joined the massive lawsuit against Xcel Energy are expected to receive their portion of the $640 million settlement before the end of the year, but the amount of money each plaintiff receives will not be publicly disclosed.
Xcel and plaintiffs’ attorneys announced the settlement Wednesday, just one day before the start of jury selection in a two-month civil trial to determine blame for the 2021 wildfire that killed two people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County.
The full terms of the settlement will not be released, though private corporations involved in the litigation may need to disclose their payouts to shareholders. The individual homeowners who participated in the lawsuit will be required to sign nondisclosure agreements, said Paul Starita, a lawyer at Singleton Schreiber, one of the firms that represented homeowners.
Not every person or company among the more than 4,000 plaintiffs will receive the same amount of money, Stirata said. The amount each receives will depend on the level of damages.
Plaintiffs whose houses burned to the ground would be in line to receive more money than people who suffered smoke and soot damage, he said. People who rented housing or owned rental properties were also parties to the lawsuit, as were some people who only evacuated and sued for the nuisance. And claims involving deaths would be compensated with a higher amount.
Attorneys figured out months ago what percentage of any settlement or jury award each plaintiff should receive, because those dollar figures were part of the mediation and settlement negotiations, Stirata said.
“You add up all of those figures and the defendant pays you that lump sum and you give that to your clients,” he said. “It’s a fair settlement.”
Payments should start being distributed within 60 days and be complete by the end of the year, Stirata said.
The lawyers will also get a cut of the settlement as their payment for taking on the case. Each firm sets its own fee for the clients it accepted, Sirata said. He declined to reveal what percentage Singleton Schreiber will receive.
A large chunk of the settlement will go to the 200 insurance companies that sued Xcel to compensate for the massive property damage claims they paid in the fire’s aftermath. In a legal filing ahead of the trial, those insurance firms said they suffered $1.7 billion in losses. It is not known what settlement amount they agreed to.
The Target Corporation was a plaintiff as well because its store in Superior was closed for months due to fire damage. The city of Boulder, Boulder County and the Boulder Valley School District were also plaintiffs.
The fire ignited first on the property of the Twelve Tribes religious cult, which has a compound on Eldorado Drive, near the Marshall Mesa Open Space. That ignition was caused by smoldering embers left over from a Dec. 24 burn-pit fire on the property.
The Mountain View Fire Protection District and Boulder County sheriff’s deputies responded when neighbors reported the fire, and the cult members extinguished the blaze by burying it with dirt. However, strong winds on Dec. 30 uncovered the smoldering embers and sent them flying into dry grasses and brush.
A second ignition occurred about an hour and 20 minutes later when wires and electrical equipment from an Xcel utility pole became unmoored, clashed into each other and threw sparks into dry grass at the trailhead, an investigation by the Boulder County district attorney and sheriff’s offices found.
In the settlement, Xcel did not admit fault or negligence for the fire and continues to deny that its equipment ignited the Marshall fire.
The Twelve Tribes was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Stirata said that’s because “we didn’t see them as an entity you could recover (money) from.” The cult also would have been able to claim it was given the OK by the fire department on Dec. 24, he said.
The various lawyers will appear before Judge Christopher Zenisek on Nov. 5 to provide an update on the settlement.
As wildfires burned thousands of acres across the Front Range on Wednesday, some residents heeded early morning calls to leave while others opted to stay put on land that already required extra self-sufficiency.
At the Dakota Ridge High School, the evacuation site for the Quarry fire burning near Deer Creek Canyon in Jefferson County, John Banks coughed in the parking lot as smoke from the fire threatening his neighborhood hung heavily in the air.
Banks and his wife, Diane, fled the fire early Wednesday after a 1:30 a.m. phone call ordered them to evacuate.
The couple slept in their car overnight with their rescue cat, Mea, and the few items they scooped from their home after the evacuation call: medications, some clothes, John’s oxygen tanks and cancer medications, and Mea’s food and litter.
They left everything else behind in the home where they’ve lived for 34 years.
“These are just things,” said Banks, 78.
He paused, emotion creeping into his voice.
“If you lose things, you still have your friends, your family.”
The couple found a hotel to stay in for the next night and planned to spend Wednesday going to pre-scheduled doctor appointments.
“Life throws spitballs at you,” John Banks said. “But you keep going.”
When the couple arrived at the evacuation center at Dakota Ridge High School at 3 a.m. Wednesday, they were one of the first people to arrive.
By 9 a.m., dozens of cars were parked at the school — some of the nearly 600 households ordered to evacuate from the Quarry fire. A few evacuees took time to walk their dogs. In the next lot over, a Denver Fire Department crew suited up to respond to the fire.
Elden Coombs, 85, sat with his neighbors in the parking lot waiting for news. He moved to the Homewood Park neighborhood in 1969 and has lived through two other fires, a blizzard and two floods.
Quarry fire evacuee Elden Coombs waits in the shade at the evacuation center at Dakota Ridge High School in Jefferson County on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. Coombs had to evacuate from the Homewood Park area. (Photo by Andy Cross/ The Denver Post)
He left his home after getting the evacuation call at about 2 a.m. He grabbed some clothes, important documents and his medicine and fled.
“I haven’t been to bed,” he said. “I just hope they get the fire under control.”
At the frontlines of the Stone Canyon fire north of Lyons, Boulder County sheriff’s Sgt. Cody Sears patrolled the still-unburned areas where flames were flaring and spreading.
“So far, so good. We’ll see what the winds do,” Sears said as he rolled out around 11 a.m. Wednesday
He went first to an area where flames had taken a run to the northeast, threatening evacuated houses a couple of miles north of Lyons, then headed to terrain straddling Boulder and Larimer counties, a few miles south of the Alexander Mountain Fire — where residents apparently had elected to stay, hunkering down on their land.
Through smoke on Dakota Ridge Road, Sears spotted two horses: one brown, one white. He radioed county animal control crews, alerting them to a possible rescue. He was uneasy. “This fire is still really active,” he said.
But he and fellow officers, reaching homes there, found residents well in control.
At a front door in the area, Carmen Roberts, 50, came to the door and told him she and her family had stayed through the night. They had water tanks, heavy equipment, and were ready to evacuate with their horses if the flames came too close, she said.
Boulder County sheriff’s Sgt. Cody Sears talks to Carmen Roberts about her decision to remain in her home and not evacuate despite the incoming Stone Canyon fire near Lyons on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. (Photo by Zachary Spindler-Krage/The Denver Post)
“We’ve have been here over 30 years. We’ve been through these things several times,” Roberts said. “We have everything packed, out by the door. We are going to go if we need to.”
They’d slept a bit through the night. “When it happens over and over and over, the stress is less,” she said.
Yet fire perils seem to be increasing along Colorado’s Front Range, Roberts acknowledged. The problem is more and more people moving in, she said. “Fire is worse now because it affects more people. It is threatening more homes because there are more homes around.”
Near the top of Stone Canyon, business owner Matthew Lee, too, had spent the night on his property — 80 acres where he’d grazed cattle this spring before moving them away about three weeks ago, leaving the grass short enough to ease his worries.
The fire was burning within a quarter mile of his metal-roofed house.
He’d parked down the hill and, leaning on the back of his truck, looked upward. On Tuesday night, power went out at 10:30 p.m. and his cellphone went dead, said Lee, 55.
Early Wednesday, he told Sears, flames crested over the ridge. Slurry bombers dropped red fire retardant on that terrain as he watched.
He had declined to evacuate — like other self-reliant residents in the foothills north of Lyons. He lauded Colorado’s approach of aggressive fire suppression, dousing flames before fires can run their natural course.
“The most I have seen,” he said. “Yesterday, it was an air show. That’s good.”
The occupancy ban still allows cities and counties to enforce fire codes and to regulate unhealthy and unsanitary conditions, but for the most part, cities will no longer be able to restrict how many unrelated people live in a house or apartment together.
Very few cities still have occupancy limits on their books, and those that do rarely enforce them. Most of the enforcement was occurring in areas near colleges where neighbors complained about cars blocking driveways and too many loud, late-night parties, and landlords use the law as an excuse to limit the number of tenants in an apartment (a discriminatory trick that can intentionally restrict units from less affluent renters).
But late-night disturbances in college neighborhoods can occur whether it is guests or residents making the problems. And we know that both rich and poor tenants can trash a condo or fail to make rent payments on time.
The reality is that with housing reaching unsustainable costs in places across the state, more and more families are doubling up to be able to afford housing. Those families should not live in fear of being “caught” and also should be afforded the protections that come with having their name on the lease as legitimate tenants.
Colorado cities will just have to get more aggressive in enforcing nuisance ordinances that already exist in most places. Anyone can have a problem neighbor whether there is one person living in a house or 15. The problem most generally isn’t density, but rather is the behaviors that can be associated with many college-aged tenants living together. We doubt families will be a concern.
Next up Polis will likely have to consider a bill to allow ADUs on every lot in large cities. Accessory Dwelling Units are a way to bring gentle density to single-family neighborhoods. We understand concerns that coupled with the occupancy limit ban, this bill may bring more than gentle density.
That’s why we are glad to see changes in the proposed law that allow for local jurisdictions to regulate setbacks for detached ADUs. It’s a gentle acquiescence that not every lot, in every city is appropriate for a detached ADU, but that some would try to squeeze one in any way possible to maximize return on investment on a small lot even if the unit takes up the entire backyard.
House Bill 1152 prohibits municipalities from passing ordinances that are more restrictive or require more in terms of design and appearance than the city does for other residential structures. But under the law communities will still be able to set dimensional standards and setback laws that hold ADUs to the same standard as houses. For example, Denver has a minimum amount of a lot that must not be developed, regardless if it’s simply one massive house or two units on a single lot.
The bill also includes a grant program for lower-income homeowners looking to add an ADU that they would rent and for those looking to keep their ADU rents affordable. This will be the key to making certain that more ADUs are constructed than just those that will be used as pool houses or fancy guest houses — developments that do nothing to add to the housing supply.
None of this legislation will solve the housing crisis. We don’t expect a slew of ADUs to pop up in backyards or to get developed in basements, but a few hundred a year, across the state, that could be rented out to more than one family, could slowly have an impact on bringing down rents and purchase prices.
Consumers expecting big savings from a National Association of Realtors’ class-action settlement over agent commissions may instead be in for a letdown.
The agreement drew cheers from President Joe Biden, who said it “could save homebuyers and home sellers as much as $10,000” in one example, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who said that breaking the “Realtor cartel” could save US households $100 billion over time. But the true benefits remain unclear, especially for first-time buyers who need help the most.
It comes at a precarious time for the housing market, with higher mortgage rates pushing sales last year to the lowest level in nearly three decades. It’s especially tough for first-time buyers looking to jump into one of the most unaffordable markets in history. In theory, the settlement could translate into lower home prices by pushing commissions down. But experts say that’s not a given, especially in the short run.
“No seller I’ve encountered will lower the price just because their transaction cost went down,” said Steve Murray, senior adviser to data provider and consultant Real Trends. “That will not happen.”
The NAR said in a statement responding to Biden’s remarks that commissions were already negotiable before the settlement agreement and will continue to be.
“Real estate agent commissions are driven by the market and are not the cause of the affordability crisis,” the NAR said.
How the changes ripple out and impact the market is a subject of heated debate, in part because nobody really knows.
The decades-old system for how US agents are compensated has long been controversial. Sellers typically pay a commission to their agent of 5% or 6%. The listing agent then splits the money with the buyer’s representative. Critics argue that the structure inflates costs and creates bad incentives.
In October, a Missouri jury handed down a $1.8 billion verdict that found the NAR and others liable of colluding to keep prices high. To settle that case and others, the NAR agreed earlier this month to pay sellers roughly $418 million and said it would change some of its rules. In the most important shift, the trade group would bar sellers from including compensation details on the multiple-listing service, which has long been the most important tool for marketing homes.
That change, to take effect this summer subject to a court’s approval, could encourage sellers to negotiate lower commissions. But the industry is rife with speculation that agents will find ways to discuss commission splits through other methods, for example, on brokerage websites.
“I expect commissions to get bid down to 4% to 5% over time with variation by home price and geography,” Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi said. “It’s a significant change but will likely be gradual. I expect most of the gain to be captured by the seller, so the impact on home prices will be small.”
Possible Outcomes
The settlement was a hot topic at the American Real Estate Society’s annual gathering of academics in Orlando this week. Ken H. Johnson, a real estate professor at Florida Atlantic University and a former broker, was in attendance, gaming out the possible outcomes with colleagues.
Even the question of who is getting the benefit from lower commissions — buyer or seller — doesn’t have a simple answer, he said. In theory, the seller should pass on some savings to the buyer, but maybe not as much in a seller’s market.
And it may encourage more first-time homebuyers, who sometimes lack the cash to pay brokers upfront, to go it alone, according to Johnson. More buyers are likely to go directly to listing agents to avoid having to shell out for commission costs. But that might result in more agents with potential conflicts of interest, representing buyers and also the sellers who pay them.
“Now some buyers are going to have to pay out of pocket, or maybe buy less expensive homes,” Johnson said.
Another huge question looms over the industry. The Department of Justice has taken aim at commission sharing, arguing for a full decoupling of compensation for sellers’ and buyers’ representatives. It remains to be seen if the NAR settlement satisfies regulators.
New Rules
Agents are already adapting to the new rules under the proposed settlement. In New York, broker Keith Burkhardt is working on a new flat-rate service to provide help valuing properties, negotiating deals, and navigating the city’s co-op and condo boards. He figures pricing will be critical and estimates charging buyers between $5,000 and $7,500.
Meanwhile, buyers’ agents will also have to work harder to explain how they’ll add value to any deal, according to Iain Phillips, a real estate agent in California.
The settlement is a start, said Larry Summers, a paid contributor to Bloomberg Television, on Wall Street Week with David Westin. But most observers don’t expect huge changes to happen overnight.
“Right now, everyone is turning this ruling into what they want it to be,” said Mike DelPrete, who teaches courses on real estate technology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Some people are saying not much is going to change. Others want the story to be that it’s a seismic shift for the industry. The whole thing is being driven by fear and uncertainty.”
— With assistance from Jennifer Epstein, Paulina Cachero, and Chris Anstey
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The bank also was ordered to develop policies and procedures to ensure compliance with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. It requires mortgage lenders to report information to the CFPB and other federal regulators.
Data collected under the act is used for the U.S. mortgage market and to see if financial institutions are serving the housing needs of communities and to find possible discriminatory lending practices.
Hundreds of loan officers at Bank of America failed to ask applicants certain demographic questions required by federal law and then said the applicants declined to respond, according to the bureau’s Tuesday announcement. Those actions took place between 2016 and late 2020, the bureau stated. The applicants were not asked about race, ethnicity and gender, according to the the bureau’s order.
In a consent order between the bureau and the bank, Bank of America “did not admit or deny any findings of fact or conclusion of law” in the case.
Bank of America will have to pay millions to the bureau’s victim relief fund for filing false reports for at least four years.
“Bank of America violated a federal law that thousands of mortgage lenders have routinely followed for decades,” Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement. “It is illegal to report false information to federal regulators, and we will be taking additional steps to ensure that Bank of America stops breaking the law.”
In a statement to The Charlotte Observer, Bank of America said demographic data was collected in more than 99% of applications in the years reviewed by the bureau, and consistently had lower percentages of applicants not disclosing their race compared to annual industry averages.
“After receiving one complaint in 2020, we conducted a review and notified the government, which prompted this inquiry,” spokesman Bill Halldin told the Observer in a statement. “As the CFPB notes, we took additional steps in 2020 and 2021 to enhance our monitoring and training to ensure employees ask applicants for required racial, ethnic and gender information.”
The data collection issue had no impact on applications, Halldin said.
Bank of America took issue with how CFPB characterized the case in its news release. Halldin said there is nothing in the consent order that says hundreds of people failed to ask certain demographic questions for four years.
He noted that in the consent order, the CFPB cited a three-month period in 2020 involving 113 loan officers, and a three-month period between 2016 and 2021 with 290 officers, who recorded that mortgage applicants chose not to report their race or ethnicity in every application they took during that time.
“These and other loan officers were not asking applicants for their race, ethnicity, or sex. Instead, they were wrongly recording on applications that the applicants chose not to provide the information, which (Bank of America) then reported to the government each year,” the order stated.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Bank of America to pay a $12 million penalty for submitting false mortgage lending information to the federal government. Christopher Dilts Bloomberg News
Prior federal action against Bank of America
In July, the CPFB and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency imposed $250 million in fines and restitution on Bank of America for what the consumer bureau said were actions that hurt “hundreds of thousands of consumers” by illegally charging junk fees, withholding credit card rewards and opening fake accounts.
The CFPB and OCC took action against the bank twice last year. The first involved instance botched disbursement of state unemployment benefits. Bank of America was ordered to pay $225 million in fines and refunded hundreds of million of dollars to consumers.
Later that year, Bank of America paid a $10 million penalty for unlawful garnishments of customer accounts.
Bank of America has more than 19,000 employees in the Charlotte region, part of 213,000 workers companywide. As of June, it had $2.4 trillion in assets, and was the second-largest bank in the United States.
This story was originally published November 28, 2023, 3:16 PM.
Related stories from Charlotte Observer
Chase Jordan is a business reporter for The Charlotte Observer, and has nearly a decade of experience covering news in North Carolina. Prior to joining the Observer, he was a growth and development reporter for the Wilmington StarNews. The Kansas City native is a graduate of Bethune-Cookman University.
The numbers: U.S. pending-home sales fell 4% in November, which is the sixth straight monthly drop, according to the index released Wednesday by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
The index was last at this level in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, in April 2020.
Analysts polled by the Wall Street Journal had forecast the pending home sales index to drop by 1.8%.
Contract signings fell in all regions across the country.
Pending home sales reflect transactions where the contract has been signed for an existing-home sale, but the sale has not yet closed.
Economists view it as an indicator for the direction of existing-home sales in subsequent months.
Key details: Compared with a year earlier, transactions were down by 37.8%.
On a monthly basis, pending sales fell in all four major U.S. regions, led by the Northeast, where the index fell by 7.9%, followed by the Midwest, the South and the West.
But pending home sales fell the most since last November in the West, by 45.7%.
Pending home sales have fallen in all but one month in 2022.
Big picture: The housing market continues to stumble through 2022, as elevated mortgage rates keep buyers out of the market.
Buyers are finding it hard to find an existing home for sale, as sellers hold on to their homes tied to ultra-low mortgage rates.
November’s data is also tied to the period of time when mortgage rates were above 7%.
What the realtors said: “With mortgage rates falling throughout December, home-buying activity should inevitably rebound in the coming months and help economic growth,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said.
What they’re saying: “Housing markets have entered a winter freeze,” George Ratiu, senior economist at Realtor.com, said in a statement.
“With prices for existing homes still elevated … and mortgage rates above 6%, homebuyers are finding much of today’s real estate landscape inaccessible,” he added.
Ratiu estimated that monthly mortgage payment for a median-priced home has gone up by $780 since last year.
Market reaction: The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.10%
and the S&P 500 SPX, -1.20%
were mixed in early trading on Wednesday. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.872%
rose above 3.8%.
(Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones, also a subsidiary of News Corp.)
