Hope Now Alliance

The year is 2007. Fergie is on the radio, How I Met Your Mother is on the tube, and Snapchat, uh...doesn’t yet exist. Despite all of that, there is a sense of unease in the air: the American economy is underperforming and interest rates are dropping. Businesses are going under. People are losing their jobs and their houses. It’s dark days, and people all over the country are asking themselves, “Who can save us now?”

Then, in a flash of supreme real estate brilliance, the Hope Now Alliance forms and rises from the ashes of the subprime mortgage crisis, like Fawkes in the Chamber of Secrets. The Alliance, whose superhero members come from every corner of the mortgage industry—we’re talking government officials, lenders, lawyers, investors—banded together to combat the foreclosure epidemic ravaging the country. They reached out to distressed homeowners, set up a hotline people could call with foreclosure questions, and even helped some folks renegotiate their home loans.

Some estimate that, before the Alliance switched gears and started focusing on other mortgage-related societal issues, they helped somewhere in the neighborhood of a million Americans avoid losing their homes to foreclosure. Hope Now indeed.