Has HB 87 Solved Florida's Foreclosure Problems?
Florida experienced the most intense and widespread ravages of the mortgage crisis in 2008, and new foreclosures are still occuring at an alarming rate a half decade later. Even worse, Florida is a judicial foreclosure state. This means that all foreclosures have to proceed through a set process in the court of law, which can take years for each individual case. In addition to the new cases that are entering the courts daily, there are over 100,000 cases still waiting to be re-tried after the "robo-signing" scandal shut down all Florida foreclosure proceedings in late 2010. These factors combined to create a perfect storm of epic proportions in Florida's courts: so large, in fact, that there are currently over 328,000 foreclosures languishing within Florida's judicial system.
Florida may be in the Southernmost part of the United States, but it was and still is the center of the foreclosure crisis. Even today, thousands of Floridians are served with foreclosure papers every month. Florida is a judicial foreclosure state, meaning that foreclosures have to proceed through through the court system in order to be completed. This combination of judicial foreclosure and the severity of the foreclosure crisis has created what is consistently the nation's largest backlog of foreclosure cases; a problem which Florida's government had not addressed until recently.
In 2009, President Obama introduced the Home Affordable Modification Program (also known as 
