[dropcap size=big]S[/dropcap]ilvia Venegas grew up in Van Nuys. She raised her children there. She calls herself a “typical Latina Valley girl.” And now’s she in a fight the likes of which Los Angeles hasn’t seen since the dark days of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.
It’s a five-year-long battle involving three multi-billion-dollar corporations, alleged illegal lender maneuvering, and one family stuck in the middle during the city’s latest housing crisis. The lawyers and supporters who know her story swear Venegas is a fighter. She’s up against power players in a giant real estate machine, and beat them to a standstill – at least for now.
Her case embodies a little seen front of the housing crisis in Los Angeles, some 10 years after the beginning of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in 2008. Homeowners are still foreclosed on by loan servicing companies through the practice of dual tracking, despite legislation passed in 2013 and 2014 designed to prevent it.
'She needs to challenge how they got the title in the first place.'
For the past 14 years, Venegas has lived on the same wide suburban avenue, the kind of residential street in the San Fernando Valley that, instead of sidewalks on either side of it, is hemmed in by wild brush, unkempt lawns, and the occasional spindly Eucalyptus tree.