ATHOL — What do people do when a foreclosure notice comes in the mail?
“You get a notice saying you’re being evicted, your house is being foreclosed on, you leave,” said Building Inspector Brianna Skowyra. “I feel like in a lot of situations these are good hardworking people who just are sort of at the end of the rope, so they move out, because that’s what good people do.”
But where the residents do the expected, the banks often don’t.
“The bank doesn’t go through on the foreclosure because with property values being lower in Athol, the banks don’t want to go through with the foreclosure, so they’ll just sit on them,” Skowyra said. This seems to be the trend for big banks since the recession, she said.
This is one of the situations the town’s Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Committee has to contend with.
The big national banks will keep paying the taxes, Skowyra said, but the property still belongs to a private party. Skowyra said she now advises residents facing foreclosure not to leave their homes until the bank follows through by sending someone to their doorstep.
The situation Skowyra describes is part of how the town found itself with about 180 vacant and abandoned buildings, mostly homes with a handful of commercial properties. Some in dangerous condition, some just a black eye on the neighborhood’s property values. That’s between 4 and 5 percent of the housing stock, based on figures from the assessors.
Skowyra said she and Fire Chief John Duguay noticed the high number during the course of their day-to-day work around 2012, and started counting, then formed a committee to do something about it. The Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Committee includes selectmen and residents, people who are better positioned to hear about abandoned properties, she said. As a committee, they have won some town support to spend money taking houses off the list. Voters at town meetings in 2013, 2014 and 2015 authorized a total of $115,000 toward costs associated with demolition, including the title search to find the true owner and legal fees.
Sometimes that means putting properties into receivership through the state Attorney General’s Abandoned Housing Initiative, sometimes it means tax-taking and auction to a new buyer, sometimes just a lot of letter-writing to banks with orders to correct health and building code violations.
The AG’s Abandoned Housing Initiative is a sanitary code enforcement process through which the state takes on the legal cost of securing a court-appointed receiver for a property in disrepair if the owner cannot or will not correct code violations. The receiver fixes the property up, bills the owner for the repairs, then sells it to recoup costs if the owner cannot or will not pay the bill. The theory is that abandoned properties create safety hazards, attract crime and lower property values, according to the AG’s website.
The number of identified properties in Athol is very fluid, Skowyra said, but the town is now down to 150 to 160 vacant buildings, still mostly homes. That’s good news for all homeowners, she said; the assessors report homes are selling faster and are selling for their assessed value. Home sales peaked in Athol in 2007 then dropped until 2014, when things began to turn around, according to Assessor Lisa Aldrich, recorded in minutes of a past Buildings Committee meeting.
“By getting rid of some of the blight, there seems to be a systemic impact on all of the property values,” Skowyra said.
Banks that used to ignore town correspondence are also starting to respond, she said. Local banks have worked with the town all along, Skowyra said, and at least one is actively working to address the problem.
Some banks will sit on one of these limbo properties as real-estate speculators do, paying property taxes and hiring managers for property upkeep. Skowyra said the upkeep is often minimal — mowing the lawn twice a year and slapping up a temporary porch when the old one catches a car. This isn’t necessarily an ideal protection of the investment, but banks are so far away they may not realize it. A big bank representative sent out to meet town officials insisted the lawns were being mowed at several properties, she said, until he was taken to see them. Evidently the bank was paying someone for upkeep, but it wasn’t being done.
Even with the progress Athol is making, it’s still a lot of empty buildings. In Montague, a town with a population about two thirds that of Athol, Building Inspector David Jensen expressed surprise at the magnitude of Athol’s vacant and abandoned buildings problem. Jensen said Montague has just a handful, including large industrial properties, and they’re enough to contend with on their own.
In Greenfield — with a population one third larger than Athol’s at the last census — the building department lists about 64 vacant properties, the list a result of a 2014 local ordinance requiring owners to register vacant properties.
One of the improvements Skowyra is most proud of is a database of vacant homes that she is able to update from the field and that includes information such as potential dangers to firefighters. Marked by a red “X” on the physical building, these buildings are shaded red on the digital map and list known hazards such as large holes in the floor.
Of course, bank foreclosure isn’t the only circumstance that can lead to abandonment, nor are all the mortgages in question products of the sub-prime lending crisis. Assessor Lisa Aldrich said there are too many individual circumstances to characterize as a group.
The burned home at 2275 South Athol Road is one example of a unique circumstance and alleged bank disengagement. Town Manager Shaun Suhoski recently awarded a $26,040 contract to low-bidder Mallet Excavating to demolish the building. A fire took the life of the homeowner in February 2015, and left the home uninhabitable. Efforts to have the estate or mortgage holder remove the structure were unsuccessful, Suhoski wrote.
“Given the inability of the heirs — and apparent disregard by the mortgage holder — the town had no choice but to rid the neighborhood of the remainder of this structure,” Suhoski said in a release.
The bank involved, TD Bank, had a lien on the property but did not follow through on the claim, according to town records.
Asked for comment, Judith Schmidt, Head of Corporate Media Relations for TD Bank, wrote that the bank follows federal and state laws in regards to foreclosure practices and in this instance did not initiate foreclosure. “When we learned about the condition of the property, we proactively released the bank’s mortgage so that the town would be able to resell the property and recoup associated expenses,” Schmidt wrote.
Asbestos raised the price tag for demolition, and the town has put a lien on the property. Athol is pursuing home-rule legislation to create a revolving fund that would allow money recouped through property liens and leftover from appropriations to continue fighting the abandoned homes problem in a dedicated fund, rather than flowing into the general fund.
The South Athol Road property, at the top of the committee’s “top 10” priority list, is to be cleared away within 45 days.
Athol Credit Union President Kevin Miller said the bank caught on several months ago to the number of vacant homes and red X’s around town, and has met with Skowyra and others.
Local lenders have an advantage in terms of vantage point, Miller says. Locals are more likely to notice when a borrower walks away from a property they can no longer afford.
Abandoned homes are bad for property values and the tax base, Miller said, and the key is to get people back into them. “The key is not so much to do anything particular with the house but, to the extent we can, to get a homeowner back in the house,” Miller said.
The credit union can help through financing, counseling and first-time home-buyer education programs, and has access to federal grants that can be used to help people who can afford a mortgage but not a down payment. Vice President of Lending Courtney Fifield said that when Athol Credit Union forecloses on a home, they try to get it out to a permanent resident rather than going the easy route and selling to a “flipper.” Through a Federal Home Loan Bank grant program they can also arrange loans to low to moderate income buyers that can cover a down payment and closing costs and are forgiven after five years. They have two pre-qualified and hope to get eight to 10 people into homes this year.
Miller doesn’t expect that to change things overnight, but the bankers see Athol becoming more attractive, with the new school and library backing up home prices low enough to lure workers willing to commute.
“Like most problems it’d be fun to just wave the magic wand and say ‘A-ha, we found the answer.’ That’s not going to happen … this is a problem that developed over time and it’s going to take some time to resolve it,” Miller said.
You can reach Chris Curtis at:
ccurtis@recorder.com