COLLATERAL
DAMAGE
of blue cheese dressing, a Curious
George doll, some clothes.
They don’t have a lawyer, and
Bank of America has refused to
yield. By any measure, the couple
is losing this fight.
Genel turns to Mogelberg. “You
need to stop engulfing yourself
with the emails, with the phone
calls,” she says, beginning to cry.
“We can’t keep going like this,”
she continues. “It’s unbearable.”
“I know,” he says, “I know.”
OVER THE PAST SIX YEARS,
foreclosures have wreaked immense harm on people, neighborhoods and the American
economy. Though the market is
now much improved, an estimated 4 million homes are in some
stage of default or foreclosure.
The Huffington Post has extensively chronicled the cost of
the crash to homeowners, and
the widespread failures of the
mortgage industry to effectively
manage it. But millions of renters have also been swept up in
the crisis — collateral damage in
wars fought between banks and
their landlords.
“Tenants in many cases are the
most innocent victims of the foreclosure crisis,” says Kent Qian, an
HUFFINGTON
09.22.13
attorney for the National Housing Law Project in San Francisco.
“They had nothing to do with the
fact that their landlord stopped
making mortgage payments.”
In California, at least one-third
of housing units going through
“Tenants in many
cases are the most
innocent victims
of the foreclosure
crisis. They had
nothing to do with the
fact that their landlord
stopped making
mortgage payments.”
foreclosure are renter-occupied,
according to Tenants Together, a
nonprofit housing agency. According to one academic study, tenants
account for 40 percent of all U.S.
evictions in foreclosed properties,
or tens of thousands each month.
Many quickly pack up and leave,
moving somewhere else without
much fuss. But others attempt to
serve out the terms of their leases,
a right allowed under federal law,
but not much liked by new owners, who want to clear them out as
soon as possible for resale or rent.