On a typical weekday morning a local Riverside, CA police station receives dozens of complaints about abandoned homes and all that comes along with it. Breaking and entering, squatting, meth labs, teenagers ditching school to do drugs and have sex… all being fueled by the glut of vacant homes in southern California.
In fact, it’s getting so bad that when lenders are asking the local sheriff to carry out the eviction, they refuse. A sign of the times we live in, where the act of evicting a homeowner is much worse than the risk of another abandoned home. In my post 2009 Housing False Bottom I talk about the rediculous amount of vacant homes we have in America.
Bloomberg News Published on April 28, 2009
A record 19.1 million homes stood unoccupied in the first quarter, and the U.S. homeownership rate fell as the recession sapped demand for real estate.
In October of 2008 Chicago Headlines read: BANKERS IN Chicago are angry with–of all people–Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.
Dart announced October 8 that his office would no longer forcibly remove residents from foreclosed properties, essentially imposing a moratorium on any mortgage-related evictions in the third-largest city in the U.S. and a surrounding county, with a total population of 5.3 million people.
Sheriff Jones Refused To Evict Last Winter In Bulter County, Ohio WLWT Reports
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said evictions in winter weather and during an economic recession are heartless and those cases should be sent back to the courts and resolved some other way.
This is now happening in Riverside, CA and soon to happen in many other cities if things don’t change.
Surfing the web I found this blog:
Amy Goodman: Squat in your own home
Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is the longest-serving Democratic congresswoman in U.S. history. Her district, stretching from west of Cleveland to Toledo, faces an epidemic of home foreclosures and 11.5 percent unemployment. That heartland region, the Rust Belt, had its heart torn out by the North American Free Trade Agreement, with shuttered factories and struggling family farms. Kaptur led the fight in Congress against NAFTA. Now, she is recommending a radical foreclosure solution from the floor of the U.S. Congress:
“So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave.”
She criticizes the bailout’s failure to protect homeowners facing foreclosure. Her advice to “squat” cleverly exploits a legal technicality within the subprime-mortgage crisis. These mortgages were made, then bundled into securities and sold and resold by the very Wall Street banks that are now benefiting from TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). The banks foreclosing on families very often can’t locate the actual loan note that binds the homeowner to the bad loan. “Produce the note,” Kaptur recommends those facing foreclosure demands.
“(P)ossession is nine-tenths of the law,” Kaptur told me. “Therefore, stay in your property. Get proper legal representation … (if) Wall Street cannot produce the deed nor the mortgage audit trail … you should stay in your home. … Most people don’t even think about getting representation, because they get a piece of paper from the bank, and they go, ‘Oh, it’s the bank,’ and they become fearful, rather than saying: ‘This is contract law. The mortgage is a contract. I am one party. There is another party. What are my legal rights under the law as a property owner?’
Lenders are relying more and more on “Cash for Keys” programs to get homeowners to leave.
A foreclosure defense law firm that I consult for Home Legal Source, regularly negotiates cash for keys deals for foreclosed homeowners. The most recent settlement was for a home that had a Zillow value of $145,000. The Lender gave a hefty sum of $4,000 and 30 days to kindly move and sweep the home clean.
I have spoken to an investor that personally paid as high as $5,000 to entice a homeowner to leave. However the value of that foreclosed home was north of 600k.
Rental Scams
In a recent discussion about this problem, a friend of mine in the police department said that there also is a large trend of rental scams out there. A renter thinking they gave their security deposit, first and last months rent to their new landlord comes to find out that the home is in foreclosure and the deposit is long gone with the “fake” landlord. The real homeowner had no idea.
Jon Maddux
CEO
YouWalkAway.com
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow! Do I know the feeling of being forced out of my home of 41 years!!! This house had been in my family and I retained ownership in 1992. We live in a small town and the economy here is like everywhere else, just barely surviving. I made a computer error and it cost me my home. I haven’t been totally evicted as of the present, but have been wanting to work with whomever has bought my house (meaning lender). The loan reverted back to the lender at the auction so we were told. We have been having a lawyer work with us and we are getting to the end of the rope. I certainly hope that this is all a major nightmare that will go away and we can start again with some good lenders out there and be able to stay in our home. I have already ruined my excellent credit rating of 30+ years to these lenders and I certainly hope there will be a resolution to this madness. I am going to print this article and send to my lawyer and hopefully we will hit the jackpot!!! Thanks for reading and pray for all us out there going through these difficult times!!!!
We were in our home for 14 years and just found out the bank bought it back, altho we got a modification, but during these difficult times we missed a payment and we were never told the home was auctioned on Sept. 9th, 2009. We were offered “cash for keys” but our attorney said “no way”! So it looks like we lost our home. So we will go thru the court process so we can get more time to leave. We were upside down on our house cuz of the area we live in. Only way to get our house back is to buy it back and that won’t happen. Sad but new chapter in our lives i guess…..