Chris Arnold
speaker
152 appearances
10 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 4 Apr
Chris Arnold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 3.
Appearances
This is the most Chris Arnold way to start an interview. Oh, I'm sorry. The attorney general in another state is texting me about something else. Chris Arnold is a reporter for NPR's investigations team. He has been on the show many times before. And this particular story starts when Chris got a call from a lawyer.
Yes, COVID mortgage forbearance. When COVID hit, 20 million people lost their jobs, but we hoped it was going to be a temporary thing. And so Congress said, like, hey, look, if you're a homeowner and you're in trouble, you are allowed to temporarily pause your mortgage payments and not lose your home. That is forbearance. And it's become an important part of the crisis playbook.
Yeah. And even when there is not a crisis, you can usually work with your lender to pause mortgage payments for just a few months. With COVID, though, the government extended that. Homeowners were ultimately allowed 18 months of forbearance. However, Chris was hearing that something was going very wrong with that system, and it seemed to be hitting one particular group of homeowners.
That is Quill Lawrence, our second guide today. Quill covers veterans affairs for NPR.
So Chris and Quill went searching for somebody who was in the middle of this big problem, somebody who was about to lose their home.
Ray and Becky were able to buy their home because of one of the key benefits of military service, what's known as a VA home loan. It's a loan that is backed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
And the Queens are able to get that no money down, low rate mortgage in part because the Department of Veterans Affairs acts as this almost like very good, very rich friend for the Queens. The VA basically says to mortgage lenders, hey, you can lend to the Queens and we promise one way or another you'll get paid back. And look, like this is something the U.S.
government does for most people who buy a home. You've likely heard of Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, the FHA. These are the massively rich friends that back most of the home loans in the U.S. And that makes it less risky for banks to make loans and has generally brought mortgage rates down. But yeah, anyway.
It is the Department of Veterans Affairs that helped Ray and Becky Queen get the house that they show to Chris and Quill.
When Chris first met the Queens, they were about to lose all of that. During COVID, Becky and Ray were among the millions of Americans who needed the help of mortgage forbearance. Becky's mom died of COVID. Becky had to take extended leave from her job and then lost her job. She called up the company that now handles her mortgage payments, and they told her, yeah, you can pause your payments.
Right. She says that they told her that when it was time to start making her mortgage payments again, nothing would really change. Those missed payments would move to the end of the loan. So basically, if she missed a year of payments, she would still owe those just, you know, like way, way down the road.
And to be clear, this is a very normal way to restart payments after forbearance. And the vast majority of homeowners who had trouble during COVID were able to resume making their mortgage payments in some affordable way. But a lot of military veterans with VA loans were not able to do that.
When the Queen's forbearance period was up, when they got their repayment options, that simple, affordable version of forbearance where you just move the missed payments to the back of the loan, it was nowhere to be found.
The clock was ticking on the Queen's home. Chris starts calling, like, everyone, trying to get an answer to what exactly is going on here. I can't remember exactly. One thing led to another, and I finally found a guy. We'll call this person a well-positioned source. And Chris wound up talking to a bunch of people to confirm everything. But yes, he found a guy.
And what that well-positioned source explained to Chris was essentially that The VA was being a bad rich friend because you will recall the VA is supposed to be a good rich friend that vouches for veterans, you know, promises lenders that ultimately the VA can take the hit if someone stops paying their mortgage.
Well, now, when tens of thousands of veterans took COVID forbearance, they paused mortgages temporarily. But it was up to the VA to decide how those missed payments could eventually be paid back. Like literally to decide what the options would be for those homeowners when they were ready to start paying again. Chris has this useful way to picture the whole thing.
Yeah, all those other, you know, rich friend entities, Fannie, Freddie, et cetera, that help people get mortgages. Well, they also got to determine their homeowners' forbearance repayment options, and those all seem to be going fine. What Chris's source was telling him was that sometime in October 2022...
The VA had stopped allowing the one repayment option that Ray and Becky Queen had thought they were getting, where they pause their payments, restart the payments, and the missed payments go all the way to the back of the loan. It was the VA's one affordable on-ramp.
As Chris and Quill dug into this, they discovered that there were as many as 40,000 veterans now stuck, unable to get back onto that mortgage payment highway. 40,000 veterans that were on the path to losing their homes.
Now, again, the Queens were about to lose their house. They say it was scheduled for the next foreclosure auction. And this next part of the story, Chris and Quill are just sort of running between the Queens and the Department of Veterans Affairs, just trying to figure out why the VA blew up the on-ramp. And so they go to the VA and they ask, why did you do this?
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