Huffington Post Uses Milbank Case to Illustrate Growing National Problem

January 31, 2011—A new series in the The Huffington Post uses Milbank Real Estate’s disastrous investment in Bronx apartment buildings (where residents are represented by Legal Services NYC-Bronx) to highlight how similarly risky ventures across the country are hurting tenants.

From the article:

NEW YORK — First, a heating pipe broke in the adjacent apartment, sending a powerful blast of steam into his home along with an unrelenting stench. Then, chunks of the ceiling started falling into his bathroom, and black mold began creeping up the walls. Cockroaches thrived in the suddenly tropical apartment. In December, mice popped up from the gaps between the walls and the baseboards.

But each time Sergio Cuevas sought the attention of the landlord, hoping to arrest the deterioration of his apartment in the Bronx, he got nowhere. It was like the management company had ceased to exist.

This was not the result of another derelict slumlord, but rather an example of a lesser-explored aspect of the national foreclosure epidemic: Cuevas and some 400 other tenants living in ten apartment buildings in a working poor stretch of the Bronx have found themselves stuck in the legal cracks of the American real estate reckoning, their homes claimed by no one. When trouble arises, there is effectively no landlord to call.

The investors who bought their buildings at the height of the real estate bubble, hoping to flip them for quick profit or jack up stabilized rents, have washed their hands of a bad bet. The bank that has initiated foreclosure says it does not yet have legal title, meaning it lacks responsibility. The court-appointed receiver who controls the property says he doesn’t have enough money to attend to the burgeoning problems.

The scene here in the Bronx is emblematic of a growing national problem. In apartment buildings scattered in low-income neighborhoods from New York to Phoenix to San Francisco, families with scant resources and uncertain legal rights are literally watching their ceilings crumble and their floors collapse as they wait and hope for a resolution.

Read the piece in its entirety at huffingtonpost.com.

Read about the latest developments in LS-NYC Bronx’s Milbank lawsuit by clicking here.