The banks and investment firms said most of the new foreclosure filings were against borrowers who had been delinquent on their mortgages long before Hurricane Maria hit. The department, however, recently modified the moratorium to permit some older foreclosure cases to move forward. In all, there are 425,000 home-loan borrowers in Puerto Rico and roughly a quarter of those mortgages are guaranteed against default by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has its own moratorium on foreclosure filings until Aug. But the number of delinquent mortgages remains high - roughly double the tally of overdue loans before the storm.īefore the hurricane, there were about 13,000 pending foreclosure cases in federal and local courts.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which said in a recent report that it was not prepared for a storm like Maria, has rejected about 60 percent of the assistance claims it received.Ī slowly improving economy has made it easier for thousands of homeowners to resume making mortgage payments. At least 10,000 small business were affected by the storm and insurance money is flowing slowly. Blue tarps still serve as makeshift roofs on more than 50,000 homes.
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Hurricane Maria, a category 4 storm, caused an estimated $90 billion in damage and may be responsible for more than 1,000 deaths in the weeks after the hurricane. The power finally may be back on, but life is hardly back to normal. Lenders counter that at some point a determination needs to be made whether a borrower will ever be able to make payments again. In some of the new foreclosure cases, lawyers have said the homes were severely damaged.Ī yearlong moratorium is a long one, but given the slow economic recovery in Puerto Rico, some housing advocates have argued it is not enough time. Some who get sued may not be aware they were served with a foreclosure action - and some may not be able to afford lawyers to defend themselves. He said the situation was complicated by the fact that up to 125,000 island residents temporarily relocated to the mainland after Maria. “A lot of people are going to lose their homes.” “The main problem here is that people are not prepared, and a lot of borrowers will be taken by surprise,” said Ricardo Ramos-González, coordinator of a consumer legal aid clinic at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. But the moratoriums have begun to expire, setting the stage for what housing advocates have feared could be a wave of home foreclosures in the United States territory of 3.4 million people. imposed moratoriums on new foreclosures and legal actions in existing cases after the hurricane devastated the island’s electrical grid. The filings are some of the first in Puerto Rico since several federal agencies - including the U.S.D.A. Even the United States Department of Agriculture, which has underwritten more than 3,000 mortgages in mainly rural areas of Puerto Rico, has begun to foreclose on delinquent borrowers. Over the last four months, nearly 300 new foreclosure actions were filed in federal court in San Juan and in local courts across the island.Īmong the firms filing cases are an investment firm controlled by Credit Suisse, one in which the private equity firm TPG Capital is an investor and banks like Citigroup and Santander.
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Island residents who fell behind on their payments are facing creditors ranging from Wall Street to the federal government. The foreclosure machine that ground to a halt in Puerto Rico after the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in September is slowly cranking up again.