When Nathaniel Hill couldn't make his $4,189 a month mortgage payments for his two-family East New York home, he needed help to fight off foreclosure.
[Photo caption: The nonprofit group runs legal clinics for homeowners in Assemblyman Darryl Towns' East New York office. Maisel/News]
In June he turned to Legal Services, which has been overwhelmed with city residents facing foreclosure. A private lawyer cost too much and free attorneys didn't file court papers.
So Hill, 40, a limo driver, is taking on the bank himself in court, one of about 50 homeowners facing foreclosure being trained by a nonprofit group, Common Law, to be their own lawyers.
"I tried Legal Services....I tried everybody," said Hill. "This was my first home. It was my dream, my goal."
The city's growing foreclosure crisis has outstripped pro bono and government-subsidized lawyers' ability to handle the problem, advocates said.
"There are thousands of people out there who might be in need of legal assistance, and we just don't have the capacity," said South Brooklyn Legal Services foreclosure unit director Jessica Attie.
Legal Services had so many foreclosure cases last year it had to stop taking new ones, she said. The group has now expanded its foreclosure unit. But even with an enlarged foreclosure practice, they can only take a fraction of the cases, Attie said.
There is one more complication to finding free legal assistance for homeowners in trouble.
Pro bono lawyers from elite city law firms are also not much help to homeowners facing foreclosures: Many of the firms represent the banks that are trying to take their homes.
Since April, Common Law has been running the legal clinics for homeowners every Tuesday night out of Assemblyman Darryl Towns' East New York office on Jamaica Ave.
"This was a community that was seeing a renaissance until this subprime [crisis]," Towns said. "It's devastating."
With help from Common Law, Nathaniel Hill is trying to keep his home from foreclosing.
Common Law lawyers estimated that homeowners in 90% of foreclosure cases don't mount any defense.
"That's what we have been trying to tell our families, 'Don't give up so easily. Fight back,'" said United Community Centers director Ana Aguirre. Her organization has been sending homeowners to the clinic.
Besides legal advice, the clinic enlists homeowners to help each other by attending court together. Participants also share what they've learned about the complexities of the law.
Debra Singleton, who has attended the clinic, is beginning to sound like a lawyer herself. She got into trouble when an expansion of her small business Debbie's Reins & Things failed.
Facing the prospect of losing her East Flatbush house of 30 years to foreclosure, she elected to fight.
She has even found problems with her lender's case: The mortgage company failed to pay required fees to the city until after her foreclosure case was filed, she said.
"I have to do things legally. Why don't they?" she said.
An impoverished homeowner fighting off multinational banking conglomerates is far from the ideal, admitted Common Law lawyers.
Homeowners trained by the group are unlikely to make it all the way through a trial on their own. But sometimes they don't have to in order to achieve something. Banks tend to negotiate changes to loans more readily once court papers have been submitted.
"That's what we've found," said Common Law's Jay Kim. "Everyone wants to stay in their homes and wants to pay for them in a way that's sustainable."
