The subprime mortgage crisis has hit the US hard [GALLO/GETTY]

Al Jazeera spoke to Maurice Washington, director of housing and asset development for the Better Family Life organisation in the US city of St Louis, a body that provides aid and support to those affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.

He spoke about the devastating impact of the crisis, what is being done to combat it, and why he is concerned about the US government's proposed $700bn financial bailout package.

"We have a three-tier strategy, and our initial focus before this horrific housing crisis was to prepare first time home buyers with education, teaching financial counselling and home buying education to prepare someone to buy their first home - been doing that since 1999.

The second tier is we are contracted by St Louis county and surrounding areas to give down-payment assistance to help with foreclosure and closing costs.

Our third tier is post-home ownership counselling, where we for the next three years stay in contact with that client to make sure they're paying their mortgage on time, that they followed the budget plan we laid out for them, are they having any challenges and so on.

We try to be there for them as opposed to putting them in a house and saying goodbye.

One thing we aggressively do is we look over all the documents to make sure our client is not a victim of what is called predatory lending, we've been so successful in doing that in the past 10 years we're now at a one to two per cent foreclosure rate as every customer is equipped with education to purchase their first home.

Financial greed

Washington wants help for those affected by the crisis

The aggressiveness and chicanery of the loan originators was such that they tried to make as much money as possible.

We've seen some brokers charge 'junk fees', where in one case a broker was going to charge our customers $500 for a wire transfer that cost maybe $1.50.

Unfortunately the victims have been the seniors and the minorities.

One of the most egregious cases I've seen was one lady – I can't give her name – they tried to charge her 13 per cent [on her loan], but she thought that she was getting a good deal!

The small print, people sometimes just don't read, and like any salesperson they use a lot of conversation to take your focus off what you should be reading and that's where we come in.

'Katrina-like catastrophe'

We formed an alliance with five other city housing agencies so that we can effectively deal with the foreclosure rate in the city – in the city right now 1 in 10 homeowners are either late or in foreclosure and in the county it's one out of eight.

In the past four months we've seen 633 clients from the county and almost 400 clients from the city in varying states of foreclosure – this must be up 95 per cent from a few years ago.

Campaigners have called for a halt to foreclosures

It's very challenging. 

We have our boots on the ground and since we deal with customers on a daily basis we see the tears, the blighted communities where people are put out [on the street] and what is interesting is that where you have an abandoned property crime increases, they're stealing copper and so on.

So even though the homeowner across the street is paying his or her mortgage their property value goes down, because the home across the street has gone into foreclosure.

So, crime goes up, the city loses income from taxes, so it's really a concern.

We're fighting this Katrina-like catastrophe.

What is so sad is that if a single mother loses her home, she has to go to a shelter which is another burden on the city's resources. 

We try to provide counselling or something we call a "soft landing" where we say 'let's see if we can find you a piece of rental property so you can get back on your feet and hopefully when the market shifts you can go back to your home'.

But when you miss four or five payments on your mortgage, that causes a drop in your credit score, and landlords looking to acquire tenants look at that credit score.

We worked with Catholic charities to find landlords sensitive to their needs but it's a nightmare and very sad, with children crying, women crying, even men crying – hard workers who have been victims of predatory lending, they thought they were getting great interest rates but they've been adjusted three, four times, and their mortgage leaps from $400 to $1500 a month.

Bailout deal

The challenge is – how do you speak truth to power? Sometimes anger is interpreted as anger as opposed to distress, and hopefully those in leadership can appreciate the distress part of a human being, not the anger.

It's a very complicated package for me – and I like to think I'm an astute person on the financial markets – and I couldn't imagine a person trying to understand what it means.

We don't hear anything significant about 'we're going to help you, the homeowner'.

We hear about the saving of the multi-billion dollar corporations but I haven't heard anything substantial about the individual that's going to lose that home.

Is it going to be the same 'old-boy network' or is going to get down to the grassroots people, that's my concern."