Long Island Foreclosures Spur Looters Amid Home Limbo
By Prashant Gopal - Dec 11, 2013
Brenda Clarke, a single mother of three on Long Island, New York, said looters at the foreclosed home next door stoked her deepest fears about getting evicted.
Scavengers grabbed clothing, toys and furniture that were tossed to the curb by the sheriff’s department last month while the neighbors living in the home were at work. Clarke, who’s been fighting to keep her Islip home for the past five years, begged them to stop.
“I felt like I was defending my own house,” she said. “They’re coming here too. It’s just a matter of time.”
Long Island, the 118-mile-long (190-kilometer) stretch east of New York City that’s home to middle-class commuters, blue-collar workers and Hamptons socialites, is facing a foreclosure crisis as delinquent homeowners such as Clarke wait in limbo while courts work through a record backlog of cases. Abandoned properties dot neighborhoods in towns such as Brookhaven, Islip and Hempstead, holding back a housing rebound as prices surge across the rest of the country.
Foreclosure lawsuits and auctions, the first and last steps of the process, each jumped by more than 25 percent in the first 10 months of 2013 from a year earlier in Long Island, according to RealtyTrac. In the U.S., foreclosure filings plunged by almost a third, while they fell 57 percent in Arizona and 49 percent in Georgia, areas hard-hit by the housing crash, the Irvine, California-based data firm said.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-11/long-island-foreclosures-spur-looters-amid-home-limbo-mortgages.html
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