A recent article in the San Diego Union Tribune talks about recent changes in Chula Vista’s property ordinances.

Chula Vista forces lenders to maintain foreclosures

By Emmet Pierce
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

October 12, 2008

Some lenders think there must have been a mistake when they see the hefty fines they have received for violating Chula Vista’s blight-prevention ordinance for foreclosed homes.

“I had one lender call and say, ‘I got a $13,000 bill and I want to know what you did for $13,000,’ ” said Doug Leeper, the city’s code-enforcement manager. “I said, ‘I didn’t do anything. We’re not property managers. We fined you because you didn’t do anything.’ ”

Over the past year, the ordinance written by Leeper has become a national model for communities overwhelmed by spikes in foreclosures, analysts say. Hit hard by the mortgage market meltdown, Chula Vista has taken a strong stance against lenders and loan servicers who allow abandoned houses to become neighborhood eyesores.

Under regulations enacted last October, the city makes lenders responsible for upkeep as soon as a notice of mortgage default has been filed on a vacant dwelling, even if ownership of the home hasn’t formally been returned to the lender.

The city is able to do so because the lender retains the right and responsibility to secure and repair vacant properties, Leeper said.

“That is the cutting-edge part of our ordinance,” he said.

Lenders have registered about 1,100 vacant homes in loan default or foreclosure with the city. Failure to comply with the blight ordinance can result in fines of up to $1,000 per day.

So far, the city has levied $850,000 in fines and penalties and collected a little more than $200,000. In addition, Chula Vista has brought in about $77,000 through vacant-home registration fees imposed by the ordinance. Uncollected fines become liens against foreclosed properties, payable at resale.

Notices of default launch the foreclosure process. Traditionally, lenders wait several months after a notice is filed before they take on maintenance responsibilities for vacant homes, Leeper said.

That lag often forces cities to address blight issues on their own, removing tall weeds, draining dirty swimming pools and securing open structures. Typically they seek reimbursement later, but Chula Vista has used its blight ordinance to shift that burden back to lenders.

“Lenders will respond when it costs them less to maintain the property than to ignore local agency requirements,” said Jolie Houston, a San Jose land-use attorney who has studied the issue for the California League of Cities.

Ordinances that address blight are common, but typically they don’t target lenders so directly, said Jim Brooks, director of the Community and Economic Development Committee for the National League of Cities.

Some critics say Chula Vista is playing rough with an industry that already is struggling to cope with billions of dollars in losses from failing subprime loans.

“That kind of measure will add additional costs to banks that have been hit really hard already and ultimately the cost will be transferred down to consumers and investors,” said Marc Carpenter, a San Diego real estate agent who specializes in foreclosures.

Such criticism hasn’t stopped other communities from following Chula Vista’s example. Leeper said more than 300 jurisdictions nationwide have contacted him to learn more about the ordinance over the past year. Although most are in California, inquiries have come from such distant cities as Boston, Milwaukee and Dallas.

“This is where a lot of cities are starting, with a Chula Vista-type ordinance,” Houston said. “The more vacant foreclosed homes you have, the more city council members feel compelled to do something. They can’t fix the lending problem, but they can try to prevent neighborhoods from becoming blighted.”

So far, no cities that have adopted such measures have been successfully challenged in court, Houston said. Stockton, which had the nation’s highest foreclosure rate in August, has modeled its anti-blight measure after Chula Vista’s. Coral Springs, a community in south Florida, recently did the same. Closer to home, Santee, Riverside County and Murrieta have followed the Chula Vista blueprint, tailoring it to their needs.

Wednesday, Escondido City Council members voted to tighten property-maintenance regulations to hold lenders more accountable.

Like Chula Vista, Los Angeles and San Jose require registration of abandoned homes, but only after code violations are reported, Leeper said. San Diego also tracks abandoned, foreclosed homes, said Tony Khalil, senior code-enforcement engineer. The program is less aggressive than Chula Vista’s.

“We don’t focus on trying to penalize or collect fines,” Khalil said. “We focus on returning homes to productive use.”

San Diego County, which oversees unincorporated areas, hasn’t experienced the same level of foreclosures as urban areas, but it’s examining Chula Vista’s measure to determine whether any of its elements would be useful, said Pam Elias, division chief of county code enforcement.

Although approaches to the blight problem vary, American cities have been forced to pay close attention to vacant homes as the mortgage meltdown has progressed. Some community activists have described concentrations of abandoned homes as “dead zones” that attract vandals and drain the vitality from neighborhoods.

One of the biggest challenges that cities face in dealing with such homes is determining who is legally responsible for them. That’s because lending institutions typically don’t hold onto loans. They are quickly sold to generate income to finance additional mortgages.

“We get this house,” Leeper said. “We pull the title documents. We say, ‘Look, it’s ABC Mortgage.’ We call them and they say, ‘Are you kidding, we sold that loan two months ago.’ ”

In that case, Leeper and his staff return to the title documents and send out notices to everyone whose name and address is listed. Sometimes the only way to find out who holds the mortgage on a home is to place a lien against the property. That way, the dwelling can’t be sold until the lien is paid.

During the recent housing boom, billions of dollars in home loans nationwide were bundled into securities and sold to Wall Street investors. When mortgage-backed securities were in demand, lenders lowered underwriting standards to keep home buyers in the market after real estate prices soared.

“We had people buying more house than they could afford with creative financing they didn’t understand,” Leeper said.

Within San Diego County, there were 1,979 foreclosures in August, a 1 percent decline from July, but a rise of nearly 140 percent over the previous year. The 91913 eastern Chula Vista ZIP code led the county in notices of default, with 106 filings. That area’s 94 foreclosures represented a 154 percent increase over the August 2007 figure.

Robert Klein, chief executive officer of Safeguard, a property-management firm that represents lenders nationwide, said he understands why cities are concerned about blight. Even so, Klein complains that the adoption of Chula Vista-style ordinances is complicating the lives of lenders and property managers, who now must adapt to different sets of rules.

“Every day we discover a new ordinance coming out somewhere,” Klein said.

Having to work with “a patchwork of local ordinances” will drive up the costs of lending, said Dustin Hobbs, spokesman for the California Association of Mortgage Bankers.

Hobbs said there is no need for California cities to adopt ordinances because they already have the authority to levy fines for housing blight under recently approved Senate Bill 1137.

Houston countered that unlike Chula Vista’s measure, the bill does nothing to require lenders to speed up the maintenance process.

Allan Mallach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, said the Chula Vista measure is an important tool for cities fighting blight.

“This issue of holding lenders or creditors responsible from the point when the foreclosure begins rather than after they take title is tremendously important,” Mallach said.

A recent article in the New York Times talks about maintaining vacant properties in Long Island.

Vacant, With Much to Maintain

By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER
Bay Shore

PAUL CARLOZZI, a quality control inspector for Safeguard Properties, a national property preservation company, walked the perimeter of a one-story brick and frame house, valued at $300,000 but now in default and vacant.

Mr. Carlozzi noted that a contractor had been hired to clear 48 cubic yards of debris from the yard and mow the three-foot-high grass. He said the door locks had already been changed.

But then he noticed that two windows were open. That was “not a good sign.”

“Contractor!” he yelled, opening the front door with a master key, warning any trespassers of his presence. “Anybody in here?”

The house had no running water or electricity, and it reeked of mildew. But that hadn’t deterred a “squatter” from using “a makeshift bed set up in one of the rooms,” said Mr. Carlozzi, a 30-year-old former marine.

Vandals had already taken copper piping and the furnace, “so there is minimal left to steal,” he added.

But he was having another contractor dispatched anyway, to “secure the property” by boarding up windows and installing security doors.

Hired by banks and other lending institutions on the Island, home preservation companies are racing to keep increasing numbers of foreclosed properties from sharing the fate of the Bay Shore house.

Robert Klein, chief executive of Safeguard, said that in September his 25 local inspectors and contractors did 8,500 default inspections in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and filled 330 maintenance orders for cutting grass and making repairs. The numbers represent a sliver of the company’s nationwide business during that time: 250,000 maintenance orders and 750,000 inspections to verify occupancy.

“We are seeing an increase in damages to properties,” Mr. Klein said. “We try to do everything we can to lessen the impact” to the neighborhood.

According to the research firm PropertyShark.com, foreclosures on the Island reached a two-year high in the third quarter of this year. There were 716 new auctions scheduled – 37 percent more than the number recorded over the same period last year.

One in every 1,398 homes in Long Island is scheduled for auction. Nassau County has one in every 932 homes, while in Suffolk the number is 2,422. The glut is most visible in the boarded-up homes in areas like Brookhaven, which has had 113 foreclosures, and in Hempstead village, where there have been 60.

During a recent week Mr. Carlozzi, who is based in Cleveland, inspected 52 area homes in various stages of the foreclosure process.

Such inspections include everything from driving past dwellings whose owners are 45 days late on payments to verify occupancy, to winterizing pipes and making monthly stops at homes that are vacant but haven’t yet gone reached the stage of a foreclosure auction.

Mr. Carlozzi says he also meets with contractors to repair homes repossessed by banks, so they can be put back on the market.

Mr. Carlozzi said that some distressed homeowners “sweep the floors” when they leave, while others harbor resentment at the downturn in their lives and “may take out their aggression on the property.” Thus cabinetry, appliances and plumbing may have been ripped out before he arrives, he said – though it is sometimes hard to determine whether the damage was done by homeowners or vandals.

Sometimes, the abandoned homes are used for parties or prostitution, he added.

Just down the block from the house with the squatter, Mr. Carlozzi inspected a boarded-up new home with nearly 4,000 square feet of space and balconies on three levels. An outside spigot had been ripped out and baseboard heaters were missing.

Mark Palladini, an associate broker who specializes in foreclosed properties with Re/Max Best in West Babylon, is trying to sell that bank-owned property for $475,000. Its builder, caught between the crumbling real estate market and the mortgage crisis, lost the house and a similar one next door to the bank, he said.

According to Mr. Palladini, “Copper around here is the new gold.” Vandals chopping out copper pipes and wiring “leave $75,000 worth of damage at times.”

Once eager for a bargain, speculators have been reluctant to buy foreclosed houses at auction, said Bill Staniford, chief executive of PropertyShark. Nearly 90 percent of the 336 foreclosed Nassau County properties that went to auction went back to the bank that made the original loan, leaving a growing pool of vacant and unsold properties that the banks must try to resell and, in the meantime, pay preservation companies to maintain.

Safeguard contractors fix broken stairs and leaky roofs, replace stolen fixtures and do “maid service,” dusting out cobwebs, scrubbing toilets and countertops to get the homes “into marketable condition.” They also remove belongings that occupants have left behind.

“We want to put families back in these properties,” Mr. Carlozzi said. “We aren’t looking for investors; we want homeowners.”

Todd Yovino, the owner-broker of Island Advantage, takes care of hundreds of foreclosed properties that his Huntington-based realty company handles in the metropolitan area. His firm does weekly status reports on delinquencies and helps evicted occupants with relocation.

“We are picking up the Pennysavers” off the driveway, “so the neighbor next door who is paying his mortgage and has a vested interest doesn’t need to look at an eyesore,” he said.

Boarded-up homes are a “calling card for the vandals,” Mr. Yovino said, adding that instead, he tries to keep lawns neat, put blinds in the windows and leave lights on timers.

“As soon as you board them,” he said, “you are taking off 10 to 15 percent of the value.”

Mr. Carlozzi likened his job to that of “a mortician, waiting on the tragedy of another to make a living.”

At an abandoned high ranch in Bay Shore, a pool table had been left in the living room, a pile of clothes in the laundry room, a box of crayons and a computer on a desk. There were glasses on the kitchen counter and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper in the closet.

It seemed as if “it’s all been left in a hurry,” Mr. Carlozzi said.

An article in DSnews.com mentioned Safeguard Properties’ new door-hanger initiative.

Safeguard Properties Connects Homeowners with Counseling Agencies

Rachel Daniels | 10.06.08

Safeguard Properties, a privately held field services company located in Cleveland, Ohio, announced that they have added an additional contact number to the ?door hanger’ notices they place on the doors of delinquent borrowers on the 45th day of delinquency and continuing monthly through the delinquency and foreclosure process. While typically the door hanger would have the contact information of the mortgagee, Safeguard will now also print contact information for the Homeownership Preservation Foundation’s 888-995-HOPE Hotline, which according to Safeguard has expanded their call center operation to support the projected increase in calls and to facilitate service to both HOPE NOW Alliance and non HOPE NOW Alliance member servicers. Safeguard estimates that these ?door hanger? inspections are performed on over one million delinquent loans monthly

According to Safeguard, ?foreclosure prevention has a greater chance of success when it reaches borrowers in the earliest stages of delinquency. It has been proven that expanded outreach, education, and counseling efforts by reputable homeownership education and counseling organizations, and state /local government can get homeowners on track as early as possible.? Safeguard hopes that this additional, free service will encourage more homeowners to become proactive when their loans are becoming delinquent.

Safeguard Properties was mentioned in a story on National Public Radio’s news show All Things Considered.

All Things Considered, October 4, 2008 ?

The financial crisis is talked about in large, abstract terms: the bail-out plan, the hundreds of billions of dollars, the peaks and valleys of the Dow Jones industrial average.

It is easy to forget the fundamental problem in the economy that started the crisis: homeowners defaulting on mortgages.

Millions of Americans are finding that they can’t make their mortgage payments. Hundreds of thousands of families have been forced out of their homes, leaving banks to take over those properties and salvage them for what they’re worth.

Few people see this view of the financial crisis better than Paul Carlozzi who works for Safeguard Properties, a “property preservation” company.

When a person defaults on a mortgage, the bank hires a company such as Safeguard to go to the home and seal it up. The company changes the locks, boards up broken windows, picks up the newspapers and mows the lawn.

And business is booming. Safeguard says it handles about a quarter-million foreclosed properties a month across the country, and Carlozzi says he inspects between 25 and 30 houses every day.

The homes are pictures of lives interrupted: alarm clocks, shoes, ashtrays, baby pictures and a card addressed to the “World’s Best Grandma.” All are jumbled together in musty old bedrooms.

Carlozzi looks for problems that could lower home values if not taken care of quickly – problems like a leaky ceiling or rotting trash. His goal is not to fix a property, but to get it to some minimum standard.

The part of Carlozzi’s job that makes him feel good is focusing on the possibilities for a new family moving into their new home after his crews are done.

Even with the foreclosure crisis, he says, his job isn’t so different – there have always been people who have defaulted on their loans.

What surprises him these days is the sheer number of homes in foreclosure. They’re often clustered in the same neighborhoods, just blocks apart.

That means Carlozzi and people with jobs like his get a vivid, daily picture of just how bad the crisis is – if they stop to think about it. But for Carlozzi, it’s on to the next house.

Servicing Management Magazine published an article regarding Safeguard’s Door-Hanger Initiative.

Safeguard Launches Door-Hanger Initiative

Safeguard Properties Inc., a Brooklyn Heights, Ohio-based field services company, has introduced an initiative designed to reduce the risk of criminal activity at properties left vacant due to foreclosure.

The company proposes that a door hanger be left at properties adjacent to a vacant and secured property.? The door hanger will provide an 800 number that will enable neighbors to contact Safeguard 24/7 if they see any questionable activity or maintenance issue that needs to be addressed.

Servicers and local governments are partners in fighting blight, maintaining safe neighborhoods and ensuring properties are maintained, says Safeguard, but the correlation between vacant properties and criminal activity is well documented in communities nationwide.

As foreclosures and vacancies mount, the company has seen a material increase in the number of copper-pipe thefts, arsons and related crimes at these vacant properties.? This ripple effect drastically reduces the servicer?s collateral in its assets and wreaks havoc on the communities where the properties exist.

This door-hanger approach has received enthusiastic endorsement from code enforcement and city officials, Safeguard adds.

An article in Crain’s Cleveland Business News talked about the effects of the foreclosure crisis and Safeguard’s involvement.?A slideshow of photos from the article is also available for viewing.

It’s a dirty job …
In wake of foreclosure mess, the business of maintaining abandoned homes booms

By ARIELLE KASS
4:30 am, September 15, 2008

Paul Carlozzi is a former Marine, a man with tattoos, a quick smile and piercing blue eyes.

Still, he can’t help but shake his head at what he sees people doing to the homes they once lived in, and to their neighbors.

Everywhere, windows are broken. Doors are ripped from their hinges. Aluminum siding and downspouts have been removed. So has copper piping.

Mr. Carlozzi, a field quality control supervisor with Safeguard Properties, said none of that is unusual. But as more homes enter foreclosure, he’s struck by how often people trash their houses on the way out, and by the prevalence of thieves.

“That’s a shame,” he says at one East Cleveland home, ready to be shown to potential buyers until someone broke a basement window and removed copper pipe. “We had the property ready to be occupied.”

Safeguard, based in Brooklyn Heights, is the country’s largest home preservation company. Working with mortgage companies and contractors nationwide, the 550-employee company inspects homes where the owner is behind on mortgage payments to make sure the houses are still occupied. They board up smashed windows at homes that have been abandoned and lock the doors. They fix broken stairs and railings, remove shattered glass, replace stolen fixtures and mow the lawns. They empty the houses of any possessions families have left behind.

With foreclosures coming at a steady pace, business has been booming. Safeguard CEO Robert Klein said the company was doing 450,000 inspections a month two years ago, before the housing crisis hit full force. Last month, that number was 780,000.

“In the last eight months, there’s been an absolute explosion, a tremendous, tremendous increase,” Mr. Klein said. “I truly don’t know when it’s going to stop.”

Safeguard often goes to a home more than once a month to keep it safe and secure. The company, after seeing more vandalism, starts distributing door hangers to neighbors, asking that they call Safeguard if they see suspicious activity at an empty home. New boards will be painted to look like windows, in the hope that people simply driving down the street won’t notice that houses are unoccupied.

Most properties Safeguard deals with don’t reach that point, company spokeswoman Diane Roman Fusco said. Between 80% and 90% of the homeowners that go into default work out their issues and are able to save their homes. But it’s on the rest that Safeguard spends the most energy, winterizing pipes, removing bug infestations and cleaning out flooded basements.

Sometimes, Mr. Carlozzi said, abandoned houses look like their owners just left for work. Other times, said Ms. Fusco, the former occupants’ frustration is taken out on the floors and walls.

“It’s happening more. They’re causing thousands of dollars worth of damage,” she said.

Flooding and mice feces

Whenever Mr. Carlozzi enters a house, he is cautious. He checks to make sure the door is still locked, glances around for windows that are broken. He shouts, “Contractor! Anybody in here?” as he opens a door, letting anyone who may be squatting there know that he isn’t a police officer.

At a house on Westropp Avenue in Cleveland, the back door has been removed. A fan is in pieces on the floor and all precious metal has been stripped from the house. In the basement, there is a foot-deep pool of standing water. There are mice feces scattered throughout the house.

“This is the typical debris you find,” Mr. Carlozzi said. “Our goal is to not let the condition deteriorate. We want to maintain its value.”

Before the housing crisis struck, houses that had been foreclosed upon sold pretty quickly, Ms. Fusco said. Now, those homes are competing with others that are in better shape, that don’t have neighbors with boarded-up windows. That glut leads to longer sales times and more visits from Safeguard.

Mr. Klein said the mortgage companies that are his clients want to protect the properties. The companies have requested more information about code enforcement officers in particular areas, asking them to continue checking up on homes that have been abandoned. And a vacant property registry is being established, so those officers will know who to contact when there’s a problem at a house.

It’s particularly hard, Mr. Klein said, to watch as Cleveland is ravaged by the deluge of foreclosures. After all, his family lives here, too.

Still, his company is prospering. Business is projected to rise by about 30% in 2008, double the amount the company normally sees each year, and Safeguard is moving from a 33,000-square-foot building in Brooklyn Heights into one in Valley View that’s more than twice the size. The company is exploring offering other services that would allow it to grow, even after the housing market stabilizes.

While Mr. Klein said there always will be a need for Safeguard’s business, he doesn’t take any pleasure from the reason for the increase. Now, Safeguard must struggle to keep enough contractors, who do the home inspections and repair work, trained to its standards.

“Every one of our projections was blown out of the water. We’re in a crisis mode. We’re grappling,” Mr. Klein said in discussing the company’s manpower needs. “Everyone’s still trying to get a handle on it.”

Safeguard Properties was mentioned in an article in the Chicago Tribune in connection to recent changes to municipal codes in the Chicago area.

The growing charge of the blight brigade

Tired of vacant, foreclosed properties dotting their streets, more municipalities are cracking down with ordinances, fines

By Janice Neumann | Special to the Chicago Tribune

First there were the vacant homes, one with its utilities cut off, overgrown grass and weeds and garbage piling up outside. Then there was the former car wash that sat vacant for three years, windows boarded up.

Weary of making multiple calls to find owners of the neglected properties, Oak Forest Ald. Diane Wolf researched what other Illinois municipalities were doing to monitor the problem and found vacant building ordinances in Chicago, Evanston and Normal, Ill.

At the urging of Oak Forest Mayor JoAnn Kelly, who was equally upset about the patches of blight, the city council in July passed a vacant building ordinance, joining other communities wrestling with ways to combat a rise in vacancies brought on by foreclosures and a dismal economy.

“We should not have to let it turn into a blighted neighborhood,” said Wolf. “It brings down property values, and there are safety concerns.”

The Oak Forest ordinance, which was modeled after Evanston’s and Chicago’s, uses a Web-based registry, Publicrecords.com, to list vacant buildings, when they went into foreclosure and the owner’s contact information.

Each vacant building must be inspected by the city’s code enforcement officer for a $500 fee and register annually for another $200 fee. Owners must have insurance ranging from $500,000 to $2 million. Infractions cost owners $100 to $750 daily. Buildings may not be boarded up for more than three months. Each owner must submit a plan for fixing up the building, demolishing it or selling it.

The city also hired a full-time code-enforcement officer and shortened the time owners have to cut grass and weeds from 10 days to five. After five days, the city does the work and bills the owner.

“You may have one vacant home on a street that actually reflects on everyone’s house on a street,” said Mayor Kelly. “There are some streets with multiple foreclosures.”

Oak Forest, which has a population of about 28,000, had 72 foreclosures in the first half of 2008, including 30 REO (real-estate owned) buildings, according to the Woodstock Institute, a Chicago non-profit that promotes community reinvestment in lower-income and minority areas and tracks foreclosures. REOs, buildings that go to auction but do not sell and revert back to banks or mortgage companies, are the properties most likely to become vacant, according to the Woodstock Institute.

Fears about the ripple effect of vacant buildings, diminished property values and increased crime are echoed by experts.

Julie Tappendorf, an attorney who wrote the vacant building ordinances for Oak Forest and Gilberts, said vacant buildings create a host of problems for communities.

“The ripple effect from the housing crisis has been devastating, as municipalities find that vacant buildings mean less revenue because of lower property values and unpaid taxes and utility bills. Unfortunately, at the same time that municipalities see a decrease in their revenue, they must deal with an increase in costs from enforcing property maintenance codes, securing vacant buildings, and policing neighborhoods that have seen a spike in crime as a result,” said Tappendorf.

Municipalities sometimes spend up to $34,000 per foreclosed property on increased policing and fire suppression, inspections, demolition and legal fees, unpaid water and sewer and trash removal, according to the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, which helps those at risk of losing their homes.

Each foreclosure within one-eighth of a mile can reduce a home’s value by 0.9 percent, according to a 2005 study of Chicago homes by the Woodstock Institute.

Though not all vacancies are foreclosures and not all foreclosures neglected, “there’s definitely a strong relationship where areas that have high levels of foreclosures are also going to have high levels of vacant properties,” said Geoff Smith, vice president of the Woodstock Institute.

“We know homeowners lose and banks lose, but what is a little less visible is how much cities lose and how much equity disappears in people’s properties,” said Colleen Hernandez, executive director and president of the Minneapolis-based Homeownership Preservation Foundation.

Even municipalities such as Aurora, which has a property-maintenance code that clamps down on neglected buildings, are finding they need to step up their enforcement.

Aurora has had a registry for rentals and former rentals since 1982, which allowed officials to keep track of properties when they became vacant. The city now has a database of foreclosures and is starting to inspect the exteriors of the properties on it. Officials are also sending the database to 70 banks and Illinois realty agents, making them aware of the property-maintenance requirements.

“We think providing them with this information will allow them to better maintain these properties on their own without the necessity of the city’s direct involvement,” said Mark B. Anderson, assistant director of the city’s Department of Neighborhood Standards.

Aurora has a population of nearly 165,000 and had 805 foreclosures, with 247 of those REOs, in the first half of 2008, according to Woodstock data.

Robert Klein, CEO for Safeguard Properties, which maintains a number of Chicagoland properties, said the company has stepped up its efforts in recent months to talk to cities about the problem.

Northbrook enacted a vacant-building ordinance in 2007 that focuses on board-ups or other unsightly properties.

“I think people really need to be patient,” said Carolyn Brzezinski, director of Northbrook’s Department of Building and Development. “It’s very difficult when there are so many people going through this, the banks are inundated and it’s tough for them to keep up with all the demands.” Northbrook, with a population of 33,407, had 69 foreclosures in the first half of 2008, including 21 REOs.

Oak Park is planning to vote on a vacant building ordinance to help clean up neglected buildings and prod owners of vacant commercial properties. The city of 52,524 had 91 foreclosures and 48 REOs in the first six months of this year.

“This new ordinance has fairly aggressive inspection and maintenance requirements that will create some appropriate tools and incentives for landlords to actively market and modernize the properties,” said Oak Park Village Manager Tom Barwin.

In Oak Forest, Marge Carlson, a resident for 18 years, said she was fed up with abandoned homes in her neighborhood before the ordinance was passed. One home had overstuffed furniture in its front yard and a rotting pool deck in back.

“Basically I think the city should certainly have more control over what goes on within the limits of the city,” said Carlson.

Safeguard was recognized in the summer issue of USFN Report for their $150,000 donation to the Foreclosure Prevention Program of Cuyahoga County.

USFN Report “Granting Support”

Summer 2008

Earlier this summer, USFN Associate Member Safeguard Properties and its CEO Robert Klein were recognized at a special reception for their efforts to locally combat the foreclosure crisis. The firm contributed a $150,000 grant($50,000 annually for three years) to the Foreclosure Prevention Program of Cuyahoga County, the home county of the Cleveland based firm. Among those in attendance was County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, who expressed his gratitude for Safeguard’s grant, saying that it “… will go a long way towards helping to protect at-risk homeowners from foreclosure.” Information on the prevention program is at www.dontborrowtroublecc.org