Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

Courtesy of attorney Kermit Lind, here are copies of the documents filed Monday in Cleveland Housing Court by the Cleveland Housing Renewal Project (a project of Neighborhood Progress, Inc.) asking Judge Pianka to stop the sales of 36 foreclosed houses by Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo.

• Deutsche Bank (pdf)
• Wells Fargo (pdf)

As the PD reported yesterday, Judge Pianka granted a fourteen-day restraining order against the sales.

The thirty-six houses at issue are all in areas where NPI is sponsoring “Strategic Investment Initiatives” with the local CDCs.  The groups’ ultimate goal is an order by the Housing Court to force the two lenders to rehabilitate or clear “their” vacant foreclosed properties (Deutsche and Wells Fargo are named on the deeds because they are the trustees for securitized investment pools) before selling them off, or failing that, to put the properties into community receivership.

Deutsche and Wells are of course claiming that they’re not really the owners,  it’s the servicers who are responsible, etc., etc.  But Pianka’s court has held trustees responsible for code violations in the past.

The CHRP complaints include excellent descriptions of the huge issues created for city neighborhoods by the post-foreclosure “public nuisance” behavior of Deutsche, Wells, and other big subprime foreclosers.  (Lind, of Cleveland-Marshall’s Urban Development Law Clinic, and his NPI clients are the city’s recognized experts on this subject.)

Recommended reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Foreclosure crisis, Poor Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.