Foreclosures are continuing to disconcert New York Residents in January, with Brooklynites suffering the most. New Yorkers in danger of losing their houses went up by 35 percent compared to the same period last year, according to statistics provided by www.foreclosuredatabank.com, one of the leading online foreclosure databases with a detailed Brooklyn Foreclosure List.
In total, 1,825 homes in the five New York City boroughs were given some sort of property foreclosure notice in January. The previous month the number of houses that received foreclosure notices was 9.3 percent higher at 1,995.
According to Michael Hickey, executive director of the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, an organization which arranges free legal services and housing counseling for distressed New Yorkers, the city is still in a crisis. They are expecting the current trend to carry on in the same way for the next several months before it levels off.
Even though Queens has been at the center of the New York’s foreclosure turmoil for quite some time now, Brooklyn home owners incurred in 693 foreclosure notices in January — the most in the city — up 86.8 percent compared to the same period last year but down 8.5 percent compared with the previous month.
Severely volitile neighborhoods include Canarsie, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatlands, East New York and East Flatbush. “We have been seeing a tremendous increase in Sunset Park and other places that we had never even heard of before,” said Meghan Faux, director of the Foreclosure Prevention Project at South Brooklyn Legal Services, to a certain extent blaming the recent high levels of unemployment. “But most of the cases we come across are in fact loans that were never really affordable.” A foreclosure counselor in Brooklyn told us that he has seen more home owners who have job losses or whose tenants are unemployed.
Based on a report by a widely cited research company, in second place behind Brooklyn was Queens, with 616 foreclosure notices in January, down around two percent in comparison to January 2009 and December 2009. One out of every 1,836 properties in New York City received some kind of notice on foreclosure – a scheduled foreclosure auction notice, a default notice, or a bank repossession notice. However, that was by far better than the national median, where one out of every 409 homeowners is currently facing foreclosure.
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Written by Alex Rolim.
