June 2009

Saving Washington Homes

Preventing Homelessness with the Home Foreclosure Legal Aid Project

by WSBA President Mark Johnson

Car Sweet Home

It is Saturday morning in the tiny living room of a small one-bedroom home in Stevens County. Mom and Dad are still sleeping. The kids, a six-year-old boy and a girl who just turned five, are sitting in front of a portable TV watching cartoons and eating cereal. It doesn’t matter to the children that they sleep on the floor. They don’t understand that their cereal is from a food bank and their clothes are from a second-hand store. They are fed, warm, and have each other; they feel safe. Their parents feel safe, too, because although the father was laid off from his job at a lumber mill a few months ago, they were able to save their home through the help of a company that had them transfer the deed to the company’s owner who had better credit and could refinance. For now, they are renting the home from the company but once the family gets back on its feet, they can buy the house back and, the parents were told, because the prices of houses are dropping, it might even be less than they originally paid. The father is proud of the deal he made but the mother reminds him that it was she who first saw the company’s flyer, advertising “WE’LL SAVE YOUR HOME AND YOUR CREDIT!” on a bulletin board at a thrift store.

There is a knock at the door and the kids bounce up and race each other to greet the visitor. The boy gets there first and opens the door to a man in a uniform. He looms over the child. The children shrink back a little and the man sees that they are scared. He smiles and asks if their parents are home. The children run to the bedroom: “There’s a policeman at the door!”

Within a few minutes the family is standing out in the front yard of the home. The father is fist-clenched angry at himself — he feels like a complete failure. The mother is trying, unsuccessfully, not to cry. The children do not understand why their parents are loading their clothes into their beat-up station wagon but they no longer feel safe.

The family has been the victim of a rent-to-buy foreclosure rescue scam. Under the pretext of saving the home by deeding it to the owner of the company, the “tenants” are then evicted when they cannot meet the impossibly oppressive terms of the agreement.

In recognition of the real-world hardships resulting from Washington state’s recession-created rising foreclosure rate, and the important need for lawyers to advise families who do not qualify for legal aid but who are facing foreclosure, at a special meeting of the WSBA Board of Governors held on April 9, the Board voted 10–3 to authorize the transfer of $160,000 from the WSBA’s CLE reserve to fund, for one year, a volunteer lawyer Home Foreclosure Legal Aid Project. The program will recruit, train, and mentor a statewide pro bono lawyer housing preservation team to represent people with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, focusing on the 200–400 percent level who are facing foreclosure. Lawyer recruiting began in May and the hope is that several hundred of us will volunteer — the need is that great. The first clients will be assigned to volunteer lawyers in June.

Because the WSBA cannot house client files, the program will be operated in conjunction with the Northwest Justice Project (NJP). Some of the money will be used to develop an online training program with the remainder to fund an attorney and a paralegal position at NJP to handle client calls, assess needs, and coordinate with an in-house project manager at the WSBA. No additional employees will be hired by the WSBA to staff the project. Current staff are building dedicated web pages for publicity and recruitment and an attorney database of volunteers. WSBA staff are also providing project-management skills and coordinating this program with the Northwest Justice Project.

A few hours after loading all of their possessions into the station wagon, the father pays several dollars for gas to buy the right for the family to wash up in the gas station’s bathroom. He knows that the tricky part will come in the evening when he tries to find a place to park the station wagon for the night. He realizes that, while the nicer neighborhoods are the safest, the residents are also more likely to call the police when they see a strange car or, at least, come out and ask the family if they wouldn’t mind parking somewhere else. He decides on a dark country road and there the family spends their first night … in their car sweet home.

WSBA President Mark Johnson can be reached at 206-386-5566 or mark@johnsonflora.com.