My alarm clock blared at 6 a.m., but by then I was already zipping my jacket to head out into the streets of Washington, D.C., where the Mortgage Bankers Association summit on the future of mortgage servicing was being held a few blocks from my hotel. I walked faster than Texans normally walk to reach the J.W. Marriott hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. There, headline names were gathering to figure out a way to bring the foreclosure crisis to an end. Little did I, or anyone else there, know that somewhere in the city, out-of-work sheet metal worker Allen Silver was putting on his hard hat and applying the finishing touches to his sign. He was looking forward to the summit too, because the foreclosure crisis has, whether the industry likes it or not, become a fight.