Recently, Bruce Marks, a former regulator who is the founder and CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA)–a community advocacy and homeownership organization–testified to Congress about the ability of federal regulators to stop foreclosures by forcing banks to the negotiating table with homeowners.

Marks described the almost too-good-to-be-true success of NACA’s Save the Dream Tour, which he said has seen an average of 40,000-60,000 homeowners in each of eleven cities, and has modified about 80 percent of those homeowners’ mortgages. He argued that NACA shouldn’t even be needed, the government has far more leverage it could use with the banks if it simply wanted to.

When the Tour rolled into the Javits Center in New York City, I was there along with filmmaker Ryan Carpenter to check it out for The Nation.