When a man showed up at her apartment building one night claiming to be a bank representative with only a paper written by hand, Liset Herrera was not only surprised but distrustful.

"He said that we had to pay for five months of rent or we faced an eviction," says the 36-year-old mother of three.

Liset Herrera speaks during a protest in front of the apartment building from which she was evicted. Property owners are not the only ones suffering due the foreclosure crisis.

It was the first time after nearly half a year that Hernandez learned that the apartment building in which she had lived since early 2008 had been foreclosed and a bank had taken ownership of it.

During all that time, no one had notified them of such a deal, nor when or to whom they would pay the $750 monthly rent on the two bedroom apartment at 5869 Whitnall Highway in North Hollywood.

The amount the bank wanted them to pay was simply out of their reach.

"It wasn't that we didn't want to pay, we didn't have the money to pay it," says Herrera about the five months of rent they owed the bank.

Without payment, they sought the help of the Fair Housing Council of the San Fernando Valley (FHCSFV), who provided them with a lawyer free of charge, who tried to stop the eviction.

Unfortunately, that lawyer didn't speak Spanish, and Herrera didn't speak English. She says the court didn't provide them with a translator, and the man who had come to their apartment asking for the back rent ended up serving as the translator at the court proceedings. The result was predictable.

"In the court they told us that we had until June 19 to get out of the apartment," she says. And so, the family was forced to seek shelter somewhere else. Fortunately, they were able to rent an apartment for $850 near downtown Los Angeles and for the past two weeks they have been slowly moving their possessions there. Still, their kids are not all that happy with the relocation.

"Angel (a two-year-old) still doesn't get used to the new apartment," says Herrera. "He tells us 'vamonos'(let's go)."

Cases like the one above are becoming increasingly common as apartment owners default on their mortgages, often without the renters knowing, with the latter ones end up paying the consequences of this.

Hermes Ayala, a case manager with FHCSFV, has seen it too often.

"The bank took possession of this property but they're taking over so many properties that they can't administer them. They never sent a representative in time to let the renters know what had happened," he says.

When they did send somebody, that person showed up on a weekend and at night, asking the renters to pay all the back rent in full. "These people never thought of not paying," he says.

And Ayala acknowledges the legal representation for the family was simply a "disaster."

"They just didn't have the chance to defend themselves," he says. Still, Ayala says, "Banks need to understand that foreclosures are not the solution. They can't keep evicting people."

Across the nation, some 2.5 million property owners will go into foreclosure this year, forced by declining home prices and tightening lending rules that leave refinancing and selling of the property out of the question. Many of these property owners are also landlords, whose inability to pay their mortgage extends far beyond their own families.

Trying to figure out if the property you rent is in foreclosure is not always easy, but a website is helping in this endeavor. In 2008, real estate agents Dave Madam and Shawn Shepherd of Las Vegas founded www.RentalForeclosure.com, which allows you to put in your address and find this information with the click of a button. According to the website, 161,187 renters have been evicted because of landlord foreclosures so far this year.

Recently, the federal government has been trying to stop such evictions. The Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act requires that in the event of foreclosure, existing leases for renters are honored, except in the case of month-to-month leases or owner occupants foreclosing in which cases a minimum of 90 days notice will be required. Parallel protections are put in place for Section 8 tenants. However, the law does not protect you if the property you rent is in default (foreclosure) prior to signing the lease.

Labels: Foreclosures Affect More Than Property Owners