Hey, there! Log in / Register
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Hooray personal responsibility!!!! Oh wait...
Remember folks, buy a house you can't afford and sign contracts you don't read. It's not your fault, it's those evil banks!
anon is a dumbass
..and should return to his cave.
If he bothered to RTFA, he'd know these people are paying tenets to a rental property that went under, and are now being evicted because their scum landlord went into default.
but then he wouldn't be trolling.
Agreed!
Boohoo, maybe you shouldn't have bought the over-valued house then? Public outcry...next thing you know, some ice cram shop will want you to pay their back taxes on unreported income...oh wait...
Lets have a stupid person tax instead - oh wait we call that the lottery!
Easy for you to say
Mommy and Daddy's basement is always available if your landlords can't manage their money well.
Ice cram
Sounds uncomfortable. Do you partake often?
Odd ...
I'm confused. The public record shows the owner to be a Ms. Joyce Myers. The article says that the family being evicted are tenants.
How could they be "tenants" if they are also the "family"?
Is someone trying to pull a fast one, to encourage sympathy for the person who couldn't pay her mortgage?
Explanation
The family being evicted are tenants, not the owner of the property. This is a post-foreclosure eviction of the tenants. The tenants are not to blame - they kept paying their rent. But the owner lost the house to the bank, and the bank would rather the house be empty than inhabited. The bank doesn't want to deal with tenants in its property, which it's going to have to sell at a loss anyway. The bank isn't equipped to deal with tenants. So it wants to kick the tenants out before it resells the house.
which part of this did you not understand?
...the woman being "evicted" is listed as THE OWNER of the property!
This part
I don't think it's a failure to understand on my part.
The article refers to the family repeatedly as tenants or renters. Yes, Boston does list the owner as Irene P. Meyers, but the article states the families being evicted form the house include people paying rent to the owner. This suggests Irene Meyers is not one of the 4 siblings with the same last name being evicted. Otherwise, the article is misleading.
Further research indicates there are three separate households in the building. One of the women being evicted is named Abigal Meyers. The man who lives on the third floor is named Alister Meyers.
It appears the bank may end up selling the whole property to Alister Meyers (3rd floor) for the appraised value.
I haven't been able to determine their relationship, if any, to the owner, Irene Meyers.
Eviction
Wow I feel like such a chump for paying my mortgage on time.
obiqeke
You Shouldn't Feel Like a Chump...
...if you didn't pay your mortgage, you'd lose your home. And, if you have tenants, they might be tossed out as well.
(Yes, I know you were being sarcastic and trying to equate tenants facing eviction because their landlord got foreclosed on with some sort of free ride for people you perceive to be deadbeats. But there is no such equivalence. The tenants paid their rent. The banks are trying to evict them from their homes for convenience. There is no free ride for deadbeats. There is no bailout. Just your fellow citizens helping others of your fellow citizens keep their homes.)
Glad to see citizen action at work
I don't understand why the commenters above are negative about these actions. They save people's houses and avoid disruption to their lives. The only losers are bank stockholders and holders of mortgage-based securities -- and they DESERVE to lose.
Why so negative?
Because I don't have a problem with spending money I don't have. Why is everybody else an idiot?
Cents you don't have
If you read the article, it was the rent-paying tenants who were being pushed out after their landlord had the property reposessed.
The only reason they were being forced out was so the bank wouldn't have to deal with them. They paid the money they owed, their landlord didn't.
I have a friend in a similar situation - paid her rent on time, in full for years and is facing eviction. Fortunately, she isn't low income and has bought a house (meaning: she must have low/no debt and excellent credit to get a mortgage now)- but she is still facing a week or two when they might try to push her out before she can close and move into the new place. This is her fault how exactly??
Ah
In that case, fuck the bank.
Sometimes life isn't fair
I have a hard time understanding how this is a good thing.
If I am renting, then I know my situation is temporary. My landlord could do any one of a number of things to send me on my way. She could sell the house to someone else who doesn't want to rent any more. She could simply choose not to renew my lease at its term for any number of personal reasons. Finally, she could even lose the house and no longer rent to me. Why should my landlord get more choices in how to get rid of me than a bank that doesn't even have a contract with me?
I would have no deal with the bank to stay here. If you want to have a more permanent home situation, then you buy a house. If you can't afford to buy a house, you rent and deal with the instability that comes with it.
Banks shouldn't be forced to rent to people that they have no obligation to just because the community whines about it and any potential legislation should keep its hands out of this nonsense. This is market correction. If banks lose money on these houses because they made really poor deals with people who had no business getting a mortgage, then when they have to unload the house for a lot cheaper, housing prices will go down. Maybe some of these tenants can become homeowners once the bubble actually bursts and these places are available for a good price again rather than the over-inflated costs that they currently run.
We'll never know until a few landlords lose their house and tenants have to move on to a new apartment and the banks get soaked in real estate they can't unload at going rates. But this propping up of the housing market, with the Feds bailing out incompetent banks and banks complicit in keeping tenants to reduce their losses and people fighting for the government to also get involved to maintain the status quo...it's all going to spectacularly collapse as the market realities underneath of it continues to hollow out and deepen. We should ride the slope down as it happens rather than artificially suspend disbelief and reason just to feel good today, yet slam into reality later.
Some Concepts
New owners can't break a lease just because they don't want a tenant or a particular tenant.
New owners must follow state and local laws or they cannot evict - e.g. provide heat, make repairs, etc. as set forth by the laws. If they don't, they cannot even evict a tennant at will because tenants have a right to not be forced out by cutting off or not repairing utilities, etc.
Many of these banks would like to pretend that they don't have to fulfill their legal obligations - be those obligations to maintain a property under a lease or to retain a tenant who still has an operative lease. Some states say they can do this. MA is not one of them.
Communities have an interest in occupied apartments, too. How does it serve the interests of any of us if we wind up with another conflagration like that of the 80s and 90s, where owners had lots of abandoned buildings and there were a lot of fires set? That goes beyond the owner's rights issues regarding tenants, but those of us who lived around here in the 80s and 90s remember all too well.
Force
You've got a market correction and then you've got a moral correction.
Nobody is forcing the bank to keep the tenants in the house. They could still throw the family out on the street if they wanted to, within the same legal restrictions that apply to any landlord.
However, the community action made it clear to them that that would be a very bad, mean thing to do. Call that a moral correction.
Humans work at the bank, and, if pushed enough, they can be induced to make moral decisions. Community action is intended to increase the cost of decisions such as throwing families out on the street for no fault of their own. Eventually the community action makes the scales fall on the other side.
Keeping the tenants in the house isn't preventing a market correction. If anything, it's exacerbating it. The bank doesn't want the tenants in the house. Why? In the bank's estimation, the tenants still being in the house doesn't increase the value of the house to potential new buyers, but decreases it. Having the family stay in the house doesn't give the house back to the landlord. It just means the bank has a house it wants even less. So where's the interference with the market correction there?
Yeah, sometimes life isn't fair. But sometimes people can make it more fair by acting in cooperation. And sometimes people who venerate the Life Isn't Fair Creed can lose their rationality and overcompensate and needlessly abuse people to prove their point.
Amen, Gareth and SwirlyGrrl!
I find the people who don't care about the sad plight of others are anti-social to the 9th degree. They feel that they've got theirs, so to hell with everybody else. They'll willfuly ignore the facts -- such as fraud, predatory lending practices, statements from supposedly trustworthy figures such as Alan Greenspan, etc. ad nauseum -- which led many people to get in over their heads.
I'm glad some people are standing up to the banks in these cases and I'm glad AdamG is publicizing those efforts.
And, finally, I'm glad that we have such effective troll-fighters here! Thanks, Gareth and SwirlyGrrl!
Kaz isn't a troll
Thanks for the props, but Kaz isn't a troll. He's a regular poster here, and his commenting is generally constructive. I just think that, in this case, he didn't think this matter through, and his conclusions are wrong.
And the others?
The others who think their fellow citizens should be punished for the mistakes of their landlords? Or who think everybody who was the victim of predatory lending practices deserved what they got?
May I consider them to be trolls?
No.
No. Learn to respect that others can legitimately have different opinions than you.
"Troll" has a specific meaning
Trolls aren't people whose opinions one disagrees with, or even people whose opinions or manners one finds repugnant. Trolls are people who say provocative and usually off-topic things in order to get people all riled up.
Even people who post just a snippet of something obnoxious are not necessarily trolls. It may be a brief and uninformed opinion, with no desire for future self-education, but laziness by itself doesn't make someone a troll.
Now if someone had taken the opportunity of this topic to bring up guns, or abortion, or the Holocaust, or to insult this family for their race or neighborhood, then you'd have a troll. (Cue OMO)
And that is the crux of the biscuit...
Doodlebean has nailed it...although not all of us are trolls.
The comments I've read so far are wide-ranging, but the impetus of all this to highlight what is going on: the housing market got too hot, too far, and too fast, and now we're about to see what happens when someone pumps up a $210,000 house to $580,000, and now can't unload it for more than $180,000 and/or can't afford the $2,500+ mortgage per month.
Kaz, you should really hold
Kaz, you should really hold back on commenting on matter that you have no clue about.
A contract on the property is a contract, and a new owner must oblige by it, same as the previous owner. It doesn't mean a new contract can't be agreed upon, but you can't just kick someone out.
I'm confused
Is it legal for the banks to evict after a foreclosure?
Why or why not?
If it is legal now, it should be made illegal
If the bank forecloses, it should be required to assume all of the obligations of the landlord. Alternatively, what about enacting a two or three year freeze on any foreclosures where there are tenants who are current on their rent?
Landlords are not obligated
Landlords are not obligated to keep tenants without a lease. Why are banks different?
Yes and No
Even without a lease, tenants have rights. If you are tenant at will, there is a minimum notification period, and there are also restrictions if there are code violations or violations of landlord/tenant laws (e.g. the bank that claimed that "it isn't our policy to provide heating for tenants", when it was MA law that REQUIRED them to provide heat because the utilites were not separated between units).
You can't force someone to leave by cutting off heat, water, hot water, electricity, or allowing the premises to become uninhabitable. That is why these protections exist.
This is, of course, a separate issue from the immense social and TAXPAYER burdens incurred by evictions of people who are made homeless by landowners who find it more convenient to have empty buildings. Do we want a repeat of what happened to Dudley Square - lots of people needing housing, lots of burnt out abandoned buildings. The banks are burdening the Commonwealth and it costs all of us money so that they may continue to avoid the fallout from their own poor underwriting and debt purchases. Does that seem sensible?
I knew what I was talking about prior to 5 months ago
According to this article the rules changed in Nov 2007 that keeps a new owner (like a bank or investment trust foreclosing on a property) from dumping a lease on a foreclosed property. Most states (MA included...until 5 months ago) dump any agreements on a property if the lease was made after the mortgage was created. Just like how a sub-lease dies if the original tenant is evicted, a lease is null and void after foreclosure of a mortgage...everywhere but like 3 states...and MA after November 2007.
Sorry, my monthly subscription to MA Tenancy Monthly ran out last June. Ya know how that goes.
So, according to some of the testimony (pdf) at the federal level regarding what goes on in these cases, I don't agree with how banks screw people out of their lease (not claim rent, then claim no rent was paid in order to break lease). If the law is holding the bank to the obligations of a landlord, then obviously I think they need to follow through. I don't have a problem if the bank is mandated to do so, but I personally don't agree with that course of action. I know it's hard on people to have the landlord fall to foreclosure and there's somewhere between "getting tossed out in 3 days post-foreclosure" and "forcing the bank to maintain and cover utilities for an agreement they didn't enter into" where reality should eventually lie in my book.
If people end up requesting more protections from the government to the point that banks are pigeon-holed into dealing with overly complicated arrangements that were completely out of their control, then you're going to start seeing new mortgages that stipulate that the owner can't lease the property or some other qualifier that gives the bank an out. It's not just sub-prime predatory lenders who are going to be effected by this law. Sometimes people get foreclosed on and it really was all their fault and that means their tenant (who can sue their landlord who didn't meet their obligations of the lease) gets caught in the middle. In that case, the bank didn't do anything wrong and they shouldn't be penalized by having to own or setup a realty management arrangement just because their client screwed up and they were within their rights to take back the house. The end result will be tortured mortgage rules that prevent leasing or some other such loophole.
Pigeon-holing the banks
I usually have a problem with corporations declaring they have all the rights and none of the responsibilities of flesh and blood people. The idea that a bank should have a get-out-of-obligation-free card so they can do something that would be illegal for a person to do strikes me as improper. If they want to play, they should have to play fair like everybody else.
In the case of the foreclosures we are seeing, I think it would be hard to argue that "the bank didn't do anything wrong." The banks, and the mortgage middlemen, and the investment banks - did a lot of things wrong. They bought mortgages they shouldn't have, gave mortgages they shouldn't have, and bundled bad mortgages up in fancy ways to hide their lack of value. If they hadn't changed the business model - if mortgages were still originated by a single bank and held with that single bank - then this mess never would have happened. Blaming a bad mortgage entirely on the person who received it is unreasonable. Sure, they get part of the blame. But most people are rather innumerate, and should know better in the sense of being better able to do the math and realize it would never fly. The banks (mortgage agents, etc.), who really did understand the math should have known better in the sense of not trying to get away with anti-gravity.
People shouldn't take bad loans, but banks shouldn't make bad loans. We're in this fix (and we're in it substantially less here in Boston than in other parts of the country) because borrowers and lenders both made mistakes. And now borrowers and lenders both are going to have to pay for them. I don't see a problem with that, and I don't see a problem with trying to reduce the collateral damage either.
But in a democracy, unfairness can be reduced
One way is to push local legislators to enact specific legislation delaying foreclosures, or delaying evictions, or simply cutting off all funds for enforcing either one. ("Yes, Big Out-of-town Bank, you can try to evict, but our city police will not help you in any way if your efforts are forcibly resisted.") Another is direct citizen action, as demonstrated here.
I like your principle. "Yes,
I like your principle. "Yes, Judge Garrity, you can order forced busing on our schools, but our police will not help you in any way if you are forcibly resisted." Where were you when Southie needed you?