Just last week, Hampton Roads victims of Chinese drywall trekked to Washington, D.C. to make their case to lawmakers and regulators, as I wrote about last week. My colleague John Cooper has also written about how the defective drywall sickens occupants and ruins appliances, wires and pipes.
On Monday, many of those same officials came to Chesapeake to make an on-the-ground assessment of a growing problem that potentially affects hundreds of thousands of homeowners.
Sen. Mark Warner found himself putting a piece of Chinese drywall to his nose and giving it a good sniff, according to news accounts of the visit. Warner and others toured the Hampshires at Greenbrier, a development in Chesapeake build by The Dragas Cos., The Virginian-Pilot reported.
The company’s chief executive, Helen Dragas, said during the tour that her company will spend $70,000 each on 73 condos it built with Chinese drywall in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.
Inez Tenenbaum, chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said neither her agency nor any other government agency has the money to pay to fix people’s homes. That, she said, will have to come from Congress.
Warner said banks and lenders need to step up and aid people who bought homes with the faulty drywall.
"What we’re going to be doing in the meantime is seeing if we can get some forbearance from the mortgage payments being made because these families are having to continue to pay mortgages on homes that are uninhabitable," Warner said, according to The Virginian-Pilot. "Some of the families… are going to have to declare bankruptcy."
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