"The attorneys general of 49 states and the federal government reached a $25 billion agreement Thursday with five of the nation's biggest lenders - Ally Financial, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America - to end mortgage-servicing and home-foreclosure abuses stemming from so-called robo-signing practices," The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. "Under the settlement, up to one million mortgage-holders will have their debt reduced or be able to refinance at lower interest rates." Thus begins the next chapter in the financial crisis and housing crash that has defined our era.

A lot of human drama preceded it.

Catherine Elton reported on an anti-foreclosure movement that started in the northeast. "During the past five years, 4,132 homeowners in Boston have gone into foreclosure, with the vast majority living in poor and working-class areas such as Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Hyde Park, and East Boston. So far, though, the sword and the shield have helped nearly 90 property owners in the city and nearby communities buy back their homes after foreclosure," she writes. "The group has also been exporting its tactics — which have been dubbed the “Boston Model” — to other community organizations in cities across Massachusetts, and outside the state in places like Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Boston, in fact, has been deemed by some as ground zero in the anti-eviction movement, with one attorney calling it the 'last place a lawyer wants to try to evict someone.'"

Joe Nocera explained how a column he wrote helped shame Bank of America into altering a mortgage.

Matt Taibbi took the side of homeowners too. "The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This 'rocket docket,' as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench," he writes. "Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages."

Jennifer Gonnerman visited one of New York City's most foreclosed upon neighborhoods. "By now, the counselors here have seen every variation on the foreclosure saga: People who purchased houses they could not afford; people who got mortgages they could afford at the time but then lost their jobs; people who took out a second mortgage only to watch their monthly payments jump out of reach; people who were tricked into signing loans with terrible terms," she writes. "While each story is different, there are certain themes: Of the first-time homebuyers, most got their houses through “one-stop shops” in which all the players work together—the real-estate agent, mortgage broker, lawyer, and appraiser. This approach certainly simplifies the home-buying process, but the buyer usually winds up with a horrible deal: a dilapidated house with a jacked-up price tag and a lousy mortgage."

And Wajahat Ali asks, "Could it be that the best chance to save a young family from foreclosure is a 28-year-old Pakistani American playright-slash-attorney who learned bankruptcy law on the internet?"