Apartments in Decay and Distress - Where's the Fix?
The Associated Press reports: Step into Charlene Barton's apartment, and the first thing you smell is mold.
The air by the door is thick with a vile steam. In the bathroom, a broken tap never stops running. The holes in the walls are covered with plastic. By the sink, the soap holder is coated in black scum. A toothbrush rests in a cup an inch from the moldy wall.
Barton wants it fixed. The city housing inspector who gave her apartment a failing grade wants it fixed.
But in the chaos of the national housing collapse, in thousands of buildings like this one that have fallen into default and where tenants have watched the owners walk away, the answer to one simple question is not always clear: Who is responsible for fixing it?
Is it the company that packaged the building's mortgage with others and then offered pieces of them as investments? The bank that represents those investors? The company charged with overseeing the properties after the landlord defaulted?
On Wednesday, Barton and other tenants at 10 Bronx buildings once managed by Milbank Real Estate filed court papers to demand that those connected to their landlord's failed mortgage step in to repair more than 4,400 housing violations in 548 apartment units.
The tenants are in a limbo that is becoming increasingly common across the country as landlords skimp on repairs, declare bankruptcies and walk away from outsized mortgages.
Multifamily mortgages covering 340,000 U.S. apartment units and worth an estimated $28.8 billion were delinquent or in foreclosure at the end of 2009, according to global commercial property research firm Real Capital Analytics.
View the full article on The Associated Press: Apartments in Decay and Distress - Where's the Fix?
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Posted by: Nina Turner