NACA Save the Dream draw thousands hoping to keep homes
Even over the phone, Bruce Marks can be heard multitasking with gusto.
“I’m paying $23.75 per place for lunch, $26.75 for dinner and $45 a gallon for coffee! And that doesn’t even include service?” he barks at someone in the background. “Do you know how much we’re spending here?”
It’s the day before a mammoth foreclosure-prevention event in Los Angeles and Marks, the CEO of Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, the Massachusetts nonprofit running the event, sounds stressed but buoyant.
NACA’s Save the Dream tour has become a nationwide phenomenon, drawing more than 180,000 desperate people this summer to gigs in Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta - where a 2-mile-long line of people waiting to get in wrapped twice around the Georgia Dome. The pitch: a mobile loan-servicing operation where struggling homeowners can arrive with their paperwork and leave with a more affordable mortgage.
After L.A., the tour will hit Phoenix and Las Vegas, then roll into the Bay Area Oct. 16-20, setting up shop at the Craneway Pavilion, a cavernous former Ford auto assembly plant on the Richmond waterfront.
“We expect to have over 50,000 people there,” Marks said. “You’ll have people coming not just from the Bay Area but from throughout California because word will get out after the event in L.A.”
He rattles off more statistics to a reporter: “Each of these events costs between $700,000 and $1 million. We have 80,000 square feet in the L.A. Convention Center, we’re flying in 360 staff, there will be 200 (bank representatives) here with over 1,500 more in back offices staffed up. We’ll get thousands of loan workout solutions done, same day.”
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