Apartment In Foreclosure Spells Opportunity For One Brooklyn Renter

Buried in a recent story on squatters in foreclosed homes, the San Francsico Examiner tells the story of a New York City woman who found herself with a 3,000 square foot brownstone in a fancy part of Brooklyn all to herself - and rent-free.

Originally renting the brownstone with five roommates from the apartment owner, junk-mail solicitations began arriving from foreclosure rescue operators which tipped them all off that their landlord was stiffing the bank and the apartment was headed for foreclosure. An excerpt from the story:

• [J]ulia and the subletters received a letter from the owner of the building: Everyone had to move out.

• Julia remembers the day when she was certain that she would stay: Everyone was boxing up their stuff, talking about their new apartments, when she realized that the brownstone was really in limbo and that it was possible that no one would notice if she stayed.

• "People kept saying to me that it's really hard to kick out a tenant," she says, "And I suspected that the property owner maybe didn't even own the building anymore."

• Last May, Julia began living alone in the 3,000-square-foot apartment. Because she didn't have to pay rent, she had more time to work on artistic pursuits. She set up an editing suite in one of the spare bedrooms and dedicated most of her time to working on her film, a documentary about coincidence and chaos theory. "I've never made a film before," Julia says, "so there's a lot of anxiety there." However, this rent-free existence suddenly gave her time and space.

For more, see A Tale of Two Squatters.