Given today’s rancorous partisan atmosphere, which has almost shut the Congress down, what measure do you think you could get a 400-0 vote on?
A resolution saluting mothers, perhaps? An affirmation of the joys of ice cream? Approval of a flotilla of sailboats in New York harbor on a sunny, windy day? (That’s the view out of my window right now, folks!)
None of these. But what did manage to get total bipartisan support on May 15 was an act to allow American Indian tribes to bypass the Bureau of Indian Affairs and take responsibility for doing their own title searches if they wish to.
Doesn’t sound like a world-beater, does it? And yet if the Senate passes this and the president signs it, it will be the most significant step towards enabling people living on Indian reservations to get mortgages in more than 15 years.
It’s a complicated issue. Why are title searches so important? For the same reason they are in the rest of the country. No lender will make a loan on a property unless they are convinced there is no prior lien on it.
In Indian country, this isn’t done by the Stewart Titles of the world. It’s done by the BIA. They issue a title status report (TSR) on the property. And their slowness in doing so is legendary. Something that may take a week or so in the private realm can take a year or longer in the public sector.
Meantime, no mortgage. Now, Indian land titles are complicated. Reservation trust land is held in trust by the federal government for the benefit of tribes. In general you can’t mortgage this land (just as you can’t mortgage a chunk of Yellowstone Park). But the tribe can issue a lease on a property to one of its members to allow him or her to build (or have trucked in) a residence. The mortgage is made on the lease, rather than the land.
Basically, the lender gets a lien on the improvements but not the land. Why would any lender settle for this? Well, the HUD 184 Indian mortgage, for instance, guarantees repayments of 100% of a lender’s outlay. That should provide some comfort there.
Here’s hoping that many tribes start their own land offices and give our poor, overloaded federal government one thing less to do.
And here’s hoping that our 400 Democratic and Republican bipartisan legislators can line up together on a few more issues, like the debt and the deficit.
