A Dream Foreclosed: A short documentary about Foreclosure in Chicago

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1. One point that seems to have escaped notice is that when a bank makes a mortgage on a multi-unit residential property, the bank has many legal rights that are set forth in the mortgage document itself.

   Among those rights are to require the owner to keep the property in good condition and repair, and so that the owner can not let the collateral of the building deteriorate….however, whereas banks, years ago, enforced these provisions, I have not heard one story where the bank has done so in recent years.

   Further, banks get an “assignment of rents” that allows the bank, if the owner defaults on payments on the mortgage, to have tenants pay the bank the rent that would otherwise go to the landlord so that the payments on the mortgage can be kept up to date.

   Are there any reasons why the banks do not enforce their rights? I suspect there are many reasons, but leave speculation in regard to same up to those with greater knowledge about such matters.

   So, not only has the country gone into a steep recession (if you lost your job, you know its really a depression), due to the marketing of these absurd bundled-mortgages-as-securities but also the banks have allowed their collateral to more then contribute to the foreclosures and then tenant evictions.

   Paul Bernstein, Tenant Advocate
   and attorney at law in Chicago, Illinois