Wednesday, October 08, 2008

50 Elderly Unit Owners In Senior Housing Cooperative Face Loss Of Homes As Developer Falls Into Foreclosure

In Edina, Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:
  • Residents of the new Gramercy Club of Edina senior housing complex plan to relocate to a Hennepin County courtroom on Tuesday. Their purpose: to defend their right to stay in their homes.

  • The 50 or so people have dutifully made their mortgage and tax payments to live in the units, which opened last year at 70th Street and Metro Boulevard. But in a new dimension of the housing meltdown, each resident has been sued individually by a bank that has also filed a foreclosure suit against the Gramercy Club of Edina corporation, after it defaulted on loans worth $25 million.

  • BankFirst, the South Dakota-based lender, argues that because the financially struggling building is a cooperative, not condominiums, all of the units are vulnerable to foreclosure. Now the residents, many of them retired and settled comfortably into their new digs, find themselves drawn into a legal brawl that has already cost them $100,000.

For more, see Owners of senior housing in Edina defaulted, each resident being sued (Because the owners of a new senior housing complex in Edina defaulted on loans, each resident is being sued and may be ousted).