The Globe reports on a woman who moved into a foreclosed house without permission as a statement. And it worked. Rather than evicting her, the bank agreed to sell the property to a local non-profit.

The city council president is proposing legsilation that would let people who live in foreclosed properties continue to stay there as long as they pay "full market value rent" each month - until the property is sold.

... Foreclosures and evictions lead to abandoned properties. Banks have left over 1,000 properties abandoned in Boston, having catastrophic impacts on neighborhoods. These abandoned homes provide easy opportunities for crime. They become homes for squatters and drug dealers, and lead to crashing property values and skyrocketing crime rates.

The foreclosure crisis also tears apart the fabric of our communities. In March, I took a tour of the Four Corners area of Dorchester with people who'd been affected by foreclosure. The stories I heard that day were not of irresponsible homeowners, but of predatory lending practices that made it impossible for these hardworking individuals and families to keep their property. ...

The state Attorney General's office has gotten a temporary restraining order against a New York firm that allegedly used ads in the Metro to drum up business among homeowners facing foreclosure by promising legal services it couldn't deliver. Among other things, the company demanded $1,500 up front from prospective clients, which is illegal in Massachusetts and also, despite calling itself Loan Mods by Lawyers, it, in fact, employed no lawyers, the Attorney General's office reports, adding the Metro cooperated fully with state investigators.

The Dorchester Reporter takes a tour of foreclosed properties in Fields Corner that are becoming neighborhood trash dumps - including 225 Westville St., from which an entire family of squatters was evicted this week. Most of the properties are owned by out-of-town banks, which don't seem to much care about cleanliness, but the Reporter also says neighbors had been complaining about 225 Westville for two months before the city finally did something. With a photo of the property and some details of just how gross the building had become.

Julia Spitz posts a photo of an electronic signboard outside a Marlborough real-estate office that, instead of telling you the time and temperature, tells you how many foreclosed properties they have available.

Channel 4 reports:

An abandoned foreclosed home in Dorchester was condemned after it was learned people were illegally living in the trash-covered home.

225 Westville St. property record.

Thoughts: I'm not surprised to hear about this happening. Just like people investing at the top of the residential market, some investors are bound to be burnt. What I still don't understand is why some companies still pay the $60-100/sq. ft. to be in a building in the middle of a city. If your company has no need to be near a city, why pay those prices? I think after this downturn you will see a lot more office construction outside of cities.

follow more of the breaking developments here.

The state Attorney General's office has gotten a temporary restraining order against a mortgage broker who allegedly soaked troubled homeowners for fees he claimed would help him stave off their foreclosures. According to the lawsuit filed against David Coleman of Methuen yesterday:

... Coleman would target vulnerable homeowners on the brink of foreclosure by combing newspapers for victims' contact information in foreclosure notices. He would then allegedly make unsolicited calls to the homeowners where he would offer to save their homes from foreclosure by assisting them in filing for bankruptcy in exchange for a $1,000 cash fee upfront. The complaint further states that Coleman held himself out to consumers as a bankruptcy expert and an attorney, even though he does not hold a license to practice law in Massachusetts or in any other state. ... In many instances, the bankruptcy petitions were deficient and dismissed because they were incomplete or lacked the proper information. Homeowners allege that when they attempted to contact Coleman about these deficiencies, he was either not reachable or, if reached, he brushed off consumers’ concerns. ...

Terry Klein alerts us to a Supreme Judicial Court ruling today that forbids a company that made "unfair" mortgages to people who could not possibly repay them from simply foreclosing on them.

The ruling in Commonwealth v. Fremont Investment & Loan only applies to roughly 2,500 mortgages issues by Fremont, a California company, between 2004 and 2007, but it could give the state an additional legal weapon to keep people in homes they purchased with subprime loans.

The court agreed that Fremont's mortgages, typically requiring no money down but with a 20% "piggy-back loan," all with adjustable rates, were "unfair" because there was no way borrowers could ever hope to repay them unless housing prices continued to rise indefinitely and they could ultimately sell their properties. Loans made on the foreclosure value of a property rather than the borrower's ability to pay "lies at the heart of predatory lending," and Fremont could not evade a state ban on foreclosures by selling the mortgages to another company.