I read the following article recently in the Las Vegas Sun. The problem of renters being suddenly confronted by eviction because the home owner is facing foreclosure has reached epic proportions here in the Las Vegas valley. Our city leads the nation in foreclosures and, as the article details, this impacts our renters as well.
"For Henderson Constable Earl Mitchell, it’s an easy day.
As the department tasked with enforcing court-ordered evictions, Mitchell and his deputies have a trying, and occasionally heartbreaking, job — one that has only become worse as Southern Nevada has slipped into the stranglehold of the foreclosure crisis.
But after doing 17 evictions the previous day, Mitchell only has three evictions on this day’s docket, each one on an apartment tenant who has failed to pay rent and knows what’s coming. He needs little more than an hour to carry them out, and in each case, the tenants aren’t home. One of the apartments has already been vacated.
Thankfully, Mitchell says, today he doesn’t have to knock on the door of an unsuspecting renter and tell a family it’s time to go because the landlord hasn’t paid the mortgage.
“You have all these foreclosures on renters who had no clue what was happening,” Mitchell said. “They’re paying that rent to the homeowner, but the homeowner isn’t paying the mortgage.”
It’s an enormous injustice, Mitchell said, one created by a gaping hole in foreclosure law that Mitchell and his office hope to see fixed in this legislative session.
As the law is written, tenants have no right to know whether the property they are renting is in foreclosure. Many of them don’t find out until the constable shows up at the door, Mitchell said.
Mitchell and other Southern Nevada constable’s offices have persuaded legislators to introduce a bill that would require that tenants receive notification when a property enters foreclosure — not just the absentee landlords."
Excerpts reprinted from the Las Vegas Sun
Jeremy Twitchell
Fri, Jan 30, 2009
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