HPD targeting zombie homes

From The Real Deal:

The city is taking on lenders of “zombie homes” — decrepit, vacant, distressed houses with unpaid mortgages, which have forced the city to conduct emergency repairs and maintenance.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is seeking more than $1 million from CitiMortgage, Wells Fargo and other home lenders who have allegedly failed to maintain houses on the brink of foreclosure, the department announced.

The cases target five Brooklyn properties and their lenders including Rushmore Loan Management Services LLC at 581 Saratoga Avenue, Ocwen Financial Corporation at 31 Essex Street, Seterus, Inc., at 1554 Dumont Avenue, CitiMortgage at 1889 Bergen Street and Wells Fargo at 1831 Park Place.

HPD partnered with the New York City Law Department bring the cases under the 2016 New York State Zombie Property and Foreclosure Prevention Act.

The city said it had identified as many as 4,000 zombie homes in the five boroughs since the act was introduced and sends warning letters to lenders and mortgage servicers that failed to maintain properties.

Claremont Terrace apartment house has become a zombie

From the Queens Chronicle:

Councilman Danny Dromm (D-Jackson Heights) said Dr. John Ko promised him last February that long-delayed work at 1 Claremont Terrace in Elmhurst would be done in one year.

Thirteen months have passed, and the lawmaker says the unfinished, graffiti-covered apartment building abutting the Long Island Rail Road tracks is still in the same unsightly condition.

“It’s become a zombie apartment building. It’s just horrible,” Dromm told the Chronicle on Monday. “Our patience has come to an end.”

The property the building sits on is one of the more historic ones in Elmhurst, as Samuel Lord — the co-founder of Lord & Taylor, the oldest department store in America — purchased the site in 1840, eventually building homes for his four daughters there.

But 12 years ago, the final, decaying Lord home was demolished and construction began on the eight-story building.

But once the shell of it was completed, work seemingly came to a halt.

And in the years since, Dromm said, the site has become an on-again, off-again homeless encampment — “they had tents and everything” — and a magnet for graffiti vandals.

A better way to board up homes?

From CBS 2:

Broken, boarded windows are a telltale sign of a an abandoned zombie home. Throughout the tri-state area, they attract vandals and squatters.

In Massapequa, neighbors count as many as 50 eyesores dragging down property values.

Gaetine Hodnett lives next door to one such home. After complaining to the town of Oyster Bay, her local government responded with a first for Long Island.

The town has passed a law banning the use of plywood to cover windows and doors. Instead, owners and banks will have to use clear boards made of polycarbonate.

The clear boards, mandated elsewhere in the nation, bring light into an abandoned house and keep criminals out.

Zombie home is a blight on Flushing

From CBS 2:

Fed up in Flushing – residents say home in the Queens neighborhood has been neglected for decades, and they are having a really hard time getting anything done about it.

As CBS2’s Andrea Grymes reported, the windows at the house are boarded up and part of the back of the roof has completely collapsed. Debris litters the yard.

Zombie home causes neighbors to get fines

From CBS:

To some it’s been referred to as a zombie house in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, but the battle is heating up now that some residents are being told they have to help pay for repairs that fall on shared property.

Neighbors have called the property an eyesore, a mosquito haven, and even a drug house for at least ten years on Schley Avenue. Since 2008, the house has had two absentee owners and even went into foreclosure.

The home is currently privately owned by Eric Totoram and now, neighbors say they’re at their wits end.

Margaret Alverez is one of three residents who share a retaining wall with the property and have now received a citation from the city saying they need to repair the wall.

Habitat for Humanity fixing up zombie homes

From Brick Underground:

Affordable housing options of all kinds are notoriously hard to come by in New York City, but with most affordable developments currently geared toward renters, for a buyer in hopes of finding a deal, the options are particularly sparse.

Habitat for Humanity NYC is aiming to chip away at the disparity, and just last week announced two projects that, all told, will bring 48 new units of affordable homes up for ownership onto the market in Brooklyn and Queens. The properties will be split up between two different projects; Queens Phase Two, a collection of 20 single-family homes in Queens, as well as three in East Flatbush; and SEED, a three-building, 25-unit new development in Brownsville, which is slated to be the second-largest multi-family development that Habitat NYC has ever put together.

As for the single-family houses, they're so-called "zombie" homes (in other words, abandoned or foreclosed properties), which NYCHA acquired and sold to Habitat for $1 apiece in order to renovate them and turn them into livable housing options for NYC families. "This particular set of homes is a rarity, in that we’re working with NYCHA to transition them off of their rent rolls [and into affordable property]," Habitat CEO Karen Haycox tells us.

The SEED project was financed through programs in Mayor Bill de Blasio's Housing New York plan, and will be Enterprise Green Communities and EPA ENERGY STAR certified, in part to keep utilities manageable for homeowners in the long run. Habitat NYC has also partnered with programs like SONYMA (a state-run program offering low down payments) to allow purchasers to buy with as little as two percent down payment (as opposed to the standard 10 or 20 percent).

Though the timeline for when the homes will be finished is still TBD—as is the pricing on the houses and apartments—Haycox tells us that applications should likely open in fall 2017 and run through winter 2018, and that prices will be roughly in the $250,000 to $300,000 range, though may skew higher or lower.

Another zombie house in Flushing

From the Queens Chronicle:

State Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside) and homeowners are calling for an abandoned house at 25-18 163 St. in Flushing that has not been used for 13 years to be maintained.

“Once again I’m standing in front of an abandoned property here in what is a very nice quiet residential neighborhood,” said Avella, who recently urged the city to remove two dangerous cars from an abandoned property in Fresh Meadows. “As you can see from behind me, the property is overgrown, the building itself is in terrible condition and we believe one of the banks that has a mortgage on the property may be responsible for putting a tarp over the roof to prevent further deterioration.”

A car at the property, the senator added, has not been registered in 12 years and has dirt and weeds growing inside of it.

There are two mortgages for the home, both of which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to the senator, at least one of the loans was part of a package of bad loans related to a scheme to defraud investors involved in a State of Virginia pension plan. Because the people behind the second mortgage are in jail, the senator said, he could not contact them.

Hotline for reporting zombie homes

From Crains:

New York state has created a new consumer hotline to help identify vacant properties.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the number—800-342-3736—on Tuesday. It's part of a larger effort by the state aimed at addressing the large number of vacant and abandoned properties known as zombie homes.

The hotline will allow local residents and officials to report vacant properties. The state is now compiling a list of all such homes and will require banks and lenders to ensure the property is maintained before foreclosure.

Neighbor of state-owned zombie property gets vacate order

From CBS 2:

A Staten Island family was ordered to stay off their own property and even threatened with jail time all because of a problem at their neighbor’s home.

“I cannot use my grill. I cannot touch anything back here,” homeowner Keri Mullin told CBS2’s Brian Conybeare.

That includes her swimming pool on Moreland Street in the Midland Beach section of Staten Island. The ban is all because a neighboring house damaged nearly four years ago by Superstorm Sandy was abandoned and is in danger of collapsing onto Mullin’s property.

“I have a vacate order and buildings department violation on my door and I am being threatened with a $5,000 fine if I use my yard at all,” Mullin said. “My own backyard!”

The city Department of Buildings issued a violation on the zombie home at 1178 Mason Avenue on Friday. The chimney is precariously tilting and its roof is in danger of collapsing.

“Now I’m back to that point where the storm is affecting me because somebody else didn’t take care of their property,” she said.

Neighbors like Thea Friscia said they have been trying to get the former owner or the city to do something about the rat and mold infested home for years.

Abandoned house blighting the neighborhood

From the Queens Chronicle:

Howard Beach resident Isaac Maya has had to look at the abandoned, dilapidated house next to his just sit there for more than five years.

“It’s just getting worse and worse,” Maya said. “I don’t see anything going on there.”

A for-sale sign is up in front of the house, located at 164-29 92 St., but according to Maya, nobody but possums and a few trespassers have entered the property in years.

“Who knows what the heck is going on in there,” he exclaimed.

The longtime Howard Beach resident said his security cameras have captured footage of people not from the neighborhood entering the back of the property.

The interior of the house is gutted. Looking inside it, it’s hard to tell if there are stairs leading up to the second floor.

The siding is slowly peeling off the house and weeks-old newspapers are left sitting in the front of it.

A notice has been placed on the front door stating that some of the locks to the property may have been changed.

Calls to the number listed on the notice led a Queens Chronicle reporter to a Wells Fargo hotline.

Zombie homes remain a problem

From the Times Ledger:

Property values in Queens are on the rebound from the housing crisis, but despite increases in median home values, the concern over the growing number of blighted, abandoned houses is very much real throughout the borough.

There are currently 172 properties in Queens that realtors call “zombie homes,” according to RealtyTrac, a national real estate tracking company. These are properties that remained vacant during New York’s nearly three-year-long foreclosure process, and in many cases have fallen into disrepair.

Lenders pay property taxes in instances when owners abandon homes and fail to complete the foreclosure process, but often don’t make an attempt to maintain or secure the properties.

There are an additional 110 houses in Queens, mostly in Jamaica, that have been abandoned for decades under the stewardship of the New York City Housing Authority. But that number is slowly shrinking as the housing authority partners with nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity to renovate and place low-income families in them, a NYCHA spokeswoman said.

Between March 2013 and now, more than 6,000 written notices of a lawsuit were filed in Queens, which are the first state filings that result from mortgage default, property tax delinquency or common unpaid charges. Over 20 percent of the properties are vacated upon the first filing, according to RealtyTrac.

So even if a property isn’t a “zombie,” eligible for demolition, there are often hundreds more properties that are left vacant for months at a time.