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Immigrant families’ path through foreclosure and beyond
By Marcelo
Ballvé
New America Media
Mar 18, 2011
Traducción al
español
Editor's Note: This article was reported by Javier Castaño and Plinio
Garrido, of QueensLatino.com; and Marcelo Ballvé, of New America Media.
It was written by Marcelo Ballvé and translated to Spanish by Javier
Castaño.
NEW YORK—More than a year after signing it away, John Cuartas, a
51-year-old Colombian immigrant, still visits the home his family lost
to foreclosure.
Like many New Yorkers affected by the foreclosure crisis, Cuartas now
lives only a short distance away from the property he still grieves for.
“Sometimes when I pass by the house I get melancholic, and I stand there
and stare at it,” said Cuartas. “And I remember how hopeful I felt when
they put those keys in my hand. I think to myself, ‘I wonder who lives
there now.’”
For three years, between 2006 and 2009, it was Cuartas, along with his
wife, daughter and two school-age grandchildren, who lived in the house
on a street of brick and whitewashed clapboard homes in Woodside,
Queens. At first they were happy— Cuartas, who works at the cheese
counter of a gourmet supermarket, said the family had never dreamed they
would have their own home in the United States.
But soon the large mortgage payment, fixed at $5,700 monthly, proved too
heavy a burden— even when split between three working adults.
In the autumn of 2009, to head off foreclosure, Cuartas and his wife
Lucrecia Duque sold for a loss of $180,000 (they had bought the property
for $730,000 in the summer of 2006, the housing bubble’s peak).
But their losses went much further than that. Their ill-fated home
purchase and the stress of having to move into it and out of it wrecked
their savings, their credit, their peace-of-mind, optimism— and their
basic faith in the American economy.
“We call it our American nightmare,” said Cuartas.
And Queens, where Cuartas still lives, appears to lead the city in
creating the conditions for real estate nightmares of this type. In the
years from 2007 to 2010, there have been 60,263 initial foreclosure
filings in New York City, with Queens leading New York’s five boroughs
every year in number of filings, according to the Furman Center for Real
Estate and Urban Policy. Queens had 25,610 filings in the four-year
period.
But the reason has nothing to do with Queens homeowners being less
financially responsible than others in the city.
Queens neighborhoods are full of suburban-style houses with a patch of
lawn and a private parking space, which, unlike Manhattan-style
residential towers, tend to be bought by ordinary working- and
middle-class families without Donald Trump-scale financing. When the
foreclosure crisis hit, it settled with particular fury on Queens.
“Queens is the neighborhood with the highest density of single-family
and multi-family homes and consequently it’s the borough hardest hit by
foreclosures,” said Mike Hickey, executive director of the Center for
New York City Neighborhoods. For similar reasons, added Hickey,
“Brooklyn is not far behind.” Brooklyn saw 21,093 initial foreclosure
filings in the period.
“Foreclosures have hit like a tsunami,” said Arnold Higuita, a Century
21 real estate broker in Queens for 15 years. “It will be at least two
years before the storm passes.”
Queens Latino and New America Media teamed up to trace the paths of
three Latino immigrant families who lost their homes in the city’s
foreclosure crisis.
All three families agreed to speak about what they lived through so that
others might learn from the mistakes they made.
“We took a beating,” said Lucrecia Duque, who arrived in the United
States, also from Colombia, nearly 40 years ago.
The cost of this experience can’t be accounted for simply in terms of
dollars and interest rates. The long foreclosure process takes a heavy
emotional toll on a family.
As unpaid mortgage bills pile up, the strain and stress also build. And
once the family home is gone, the feeling of loss can be intense. So can
feelings of anger, shame, and regret.
“People go through a kind of grieving process. They go through all the
classic stages,” said Cathleen Clements, director of legal advocacy for
the Children’s Aid Society, a New York nonprofit helping families
affected by foreclosure.
Missing ‘la casita’
Like a man still raw about a tragedy, Wilfredo Gelpí, Sr. tries to avoid
the subject. But every so often, he acknowledges, he and his wife still
speak nostalgically about the house—they call it “la casita”— that they
owned for 10 years in the Jackson Heights section of Queens.
The Gelpís—Wilfredo is from Puerto Rico, his wife Carmen from Colombia,
both are in their fifties— lost their home last year. They had
refinanced one too many times in order to underwrite
investments—including a second home in Miami that would also be
foreclosed on.
“We learned our lesson,” said Carmen Gelpí.
Like Cuartas and Duque, the Gelpís were able to sell their Queens home
in a bank-approved “short sale.” This type of transaction allows
borrowers in trouble on their mortgage to avoid foreclosure by selling
the house for less than the outstanding value of what they owe, with the
bank agreeing to absorb the difference in order to get the
non-performing loan off their books.
So, the Gelpís were able to walk away, but with their credit damaged,
and their savings depleted. Like many families affected by foreclosure,
they turned to close family for support. For the rest of 2010, while
they picked up the pieces, Gelpí—who works in building maintenance— and
his wife lived together with their son in his roomy rental apartment in
College Point, Queens.
Then, with the new year, the Gelpís began to look for their own rental
and found one near the Whitestone Bridge that spans the Throgs Neck
narrows dividing Queens from the Bronx— a location far less desirable
than where they once lived, but more affordable.
“Imagine how hard it was, having to go live with my son, at my age, and
then look for a new place,” said Wilfredo Gelpí, Sr.
What’s worse, rent is expensive enough now at $1,050 a month that the
prospect of saving seems daunting.
Despite the terrible year he’s had, Gelpí retains his sense of humor. On
the day he was to move into the new apartment, the city was still
blanketed in several feet of snow from a winter blizzard.
“I didn’t even get a break on the weather,” he laughs.
All three families interviewed for this article had a sensation of
slipping backwards in time, of foreclosure pushing them into living
situations they had not expected to return to, especially not so
suddenly.
Cristián Rodríguez, a 38-year-old Argentine immigrant, had to give up
the house he and his wife Fatima Pérez bought in Brooklyn in 2004.
A couple of years after buying his house, Rodríguez opened his mortgage
bill and found that his variable rate mortgage, a loan type notorious
for causing foreclosures, had jumped from $2,000 to $4,000 in monthly
cost. The home in Ocean Hill, where he lived with his wife and son,
suddenly seemed wholly unaffordable.
“We were taken in by how easy they made it seem for us to buy a house,”
said Rodríguez. “We were happy at first, but that was brief. It was all
bitterness and frustration after that.”
Like the Cuartas and the Gelpís, Rodríguez unloaded the property in a
short sale. He misses his old home, and his quality of life has been
eroded. What’s worse, early in 2011 he lost his job distributing
newspapers.
‘I don’t have a plan B’
For many families displaced by foreclosure, however, a financial domino
effect leads many into terrible fiscal straits that might have been
avoided had they managed their exit more wisely, said Hickey, the CNYCN
director.
“There’s a difference between leaving in bad shape, or leaving
essentially in okay shape,” he said.
Planning in advance to minimize disruptions caused by the foreclosure
process is essential, Hickey added. Those at risk should use the free
help offered by the city government-endorsed CNYCN through its dozens of
neighborhood partners citywide.
However, Hickey acknowledges that there’s a vacuum when it comes to
counseling and other services tailored specifically to resettling
families who lose their homes after failing to pay their mortgages. And
renters, who often are forced to leave longtime apartments or homes when
their landlords are foreclosed on, also need this type of help.
“Much, much more should be done,” Hickey said.
For homeowners fighting to keep a home, the day-to-day battle is so
all-consuming that they often feel they don’t have time to think of life
beyond their current home.
Muriel Garvin, 54, who has been battling a bank in the courts to keep
her home in Jamaica, Queens, said she hasn’t planned yet for the
worst-case scenario: losing her home.
“I don’t have a plan B,” said Garvin, a city employee in the
Administration for Children’s Services.
In many cases, those affected by the real estate crisis live in an
anxious state of limbo, not knowing what may happen next. Alex Rodríguez,
38, a taxi driver, and his 41-year-old wife Blanca Tafur received their
initial foreclosure notice on their home in Corona, Queens two years
ago.
“One of these days, they’ll tell us we have to leave the house, and
we’ll have to go rent somewhere,” he said.
The Children’s Aid Society is the only organization in New York that
administers a post-foreclosure relocation fund to help families devise
and execute such a “Plan B.”
The fund, made possible by grants from The New York Times Foundation,
helps homeowners and renters alike. It focuses on families affected by
subprime mortgages—loans made to borrowers with low credit scores who
were likely to have difficulty making payments.
As of January 2011, the Children’s Aid Society had helped relocate 107
families pushed out of their homes due to foreclosure filings, with an
average of $4,500 in relocation funds given to each family. Most
families choose to relocate within the same school district so as to
minimize the impact on their children, said Jessica Schachter, manager
of the society’s Housing Stability Resource Center.
Homelessness is a risk for many families, but despite the need and
benefits of such a program— which is much more cost-effective than
housing in homeless shelters— there are no other organizations doing
this type of work in New York City, she added.
“I think there’s a huge gap there,” said Schachter. Noting that her own
organization’s funding for the program is limited, she added, “I don’t
know who’s going to carry on with this effort.”
Moving on
With or without help, many families burned by the foreclosure crisis are
already re-building their lives. For over a year now, Cuartas and Duque
have lived in a cheery rental apartment with beige wall-to-wall carpets
and a spacious living room.
True to the family’s roots in tropical Colombia, Duque has arranged a
centerpiece on the dining room table fashioned from pineapples, bananas,
and oranges—despite the frigid weather outside.
The home is cozy, and on his day off, Cuartas lounges around watching
Univision in gold-framed eyeglasses and a souvenir T-Shirt that reads,
“Antioquia, Colombia.”
Duque’s job offering daycare services to working mothers has been
unsteady ever since the economy bottomed out (part of the reason the
mortgage proved so impossible). But she puts a good face on the
situation and devotes herself to her grandchildren.
Husband and wife are still working through the financial tangle left
behind by the real estate debacle. Late last year, for example, Duque
made the last payment on a washing machine she had bought on credit, but
was forced to leave behind at the house in the rush to sell it. Cuartas,
for his part, still sees a trace of his three years of financial
scrambling in the large credit card bills he pays down each month.
The neighborhood isn’t as nice as what they had to leave behind: their
building is sandwiched between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a
physical rehabilitation center. There’s no yard now. Long gone are the
slide and swings that Cuartas had built for the kids behind the old
house.
But things could be worse. Family unity didn’t suffer. Their daughter
and grandchildren moved into an apartment down the hall, on the same
floor, so even after losing the home they all shared together, the
family has managed to stay nearly as close.
The grandchildren, a boy and a girl, drift in and out of the
grandparents’ apartment every afternoon after school.
Certainly, Duque and Cuartas feel relieved to be free of the burden that
ruled their lives for so long: the monster monthly mortgage payment.
“The tossing and turning at night, wondering where the money was going
to come from. That pressure at least is gone,” said Duque.
There is one reminder, however, that dreams of home ownership aren’t
given up easily— rooted as they are in human nature’s craving for
security and stability. Their granddaughter’s dollhouse, with its violet
roof, miniature furniture, and tiny doorknobs, dominates one corner of
their living room.
At one point Cuartas, sitting at the dining room table, declares that
they would have been better off if they had never tried to buy the
house.
“Well,” said Duque, getting up to start dinner, “let's just not think
about it anymore.”
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