Elderly Connecticut Man Loses Rented Home Of 20 Years As Landlord's Mortgage Lender Forecloses

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, Hartford Business Journal reports:

• When a 70-year-old Bridgeport man returned to the third-floor apartment that had been his home for nearly two decades, the rental unit was locked and boarded up. His landlord had been foreclosed on. The blindsided renter was collateral damage.

• Attorney Richard Tenenbaum of Connecticut Legal Services declined to name his dispossessed client but said similar incidents are being played out nearly every day in Connecticut. “There are dozens, probably hundreds, of people being victimized because they don’t know what’s going on,” Tenenbaum said. “The number of evictions caused by foreclosures has probably doubled, at least, in the past few months.”

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• After receiving a wave of phone calls from displaced families last summer, the NLIHC [National Low Income Housing Coalition] looked at foreclosure patterns throughout New England. In Massachusetts, 34 percent of foreclosures were on multi-unit properties. In Rhode Island, the rate was 41 percent. In more rural New Hampshire, multi-unit housing accounted for only 12 percent of foreclosures. “The majority of these foreclosures for multi-unit housing are for two-, three- and four-unit homes.” [NLIHC research director Danilo] Pelletiere said.

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• But there are legal mechanisms that can protect [Connecticut] renters, including a six-month stay of execution on evictions if the tenant is not the cause of the notice, Tenenbaum said. But few tenants are aware that they have a legal right to contest being thrown out, he added.

For more, see Locked Out: Foreclosures Blindsiding Renters.

For the recent NLIHC study, see Properties, Units, and Tenure in the Foreclosure Crisis: An Initial Analysis of Properties at the End of the Foreclosure Process in New England.

For other posts involving the problems tenants face in homes in foreclosure, go here, go here, go here, go here, go here, and go here. equity skimming unwittingly digamma