COLUMBIA TWP. — Evelyn Hunt sits quietly at her kitchen table, a newspaper spread out in front of her and a cup of coffee at hand.

It’s when she sits here — where she can glance up and see the cabinets that she helped her former husband hang and the pale yellow walls that she painted that are nearly covered up with the trinkets she’s collected — that she starts reflecting, thinking about her home and her life.

Because the two are so intertwined, she cannot think of one without the other.

An orphan who spent the first 15 years of her life being shuffled from one foster home to the next, Hunt, 73, said she still has vivid memories of a not-so happy childhood.

“You see, this is the only home I’ve ever had,” she said, her voice cracking as she fights back tears. “I love this house. I told my husband I would live in it until the day I die. I can’t lose my house. I can’t believe I got myself in this mess. I can’t believe I … ”

Hunt’s voice faded as she spoke last week about the pending foreclosure and sheriff’s sale that will befall her home of 38 years in the coming months.

After defaulting on an adjustable rate second mortgage, the grandmother of 10 and great-grandmother of four now faces eviction.

A growing trend

Hunt’s home, if sold, will be one in a long string of Lorain County homes to end up on the market because of foreclosure.

“It has been so steady for the past few years that we are only concentrating now on keeping up with the flow,” said sheriff’s Lt. William Davis, head of the civil division, which handles sheriff’s sales.

So far this year, 1,927 homes have gone up for sale, Davis said. The number is on track to exceed the 1,992 homes in 2007 and already tops the 1,647 homes in 2006.

A sheriff’s sale is the end of the road for foreclosure victims.

However, as the country’s elected leaders spent last week discussing and finally approving the controversial economic recovery plan that will essentially hand Wall Street and financial institutions $700 billion of taxpayer money, people like Hunt wonder what the plan will be to help folks like her.

“I don’t know why they aren’t giving it to some of these people who are getting put out of their homes,” Hunt said. “I paid my taxes and did the best I could to do the right thing. I need some help, too.”

Cries like Hunt’s have become common in recent weeks. If the bailout plan is on one end of the spectrum when talking about the country’s economic crisis, foreclosure and bad loans are on the other.

“That’s because everyone can now see that this thing started with the banks, investors, federal government and Securities and Exchange Commission,” said Cathleen Groenstein, spokeswoman for Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People (ESOP), a Cleveland-based foreclosure prevention and homeowner advocacy group.

“Brokers were encouraged to sell adjustable rate mortgages because they made money. To do this, they attracted people with lower — teaser — interest rates and told homeowners that before their ARMs changed, they could refinance the loan. However, to the contrary, those loans could not be refinanced, and now loans backers have found themselves in quite a jam. I call it the ultimate free market gone awry.”

Stories like that are  common, said Sherry Tulks, foreclosure prevention advocate working in Lorain for ESOP. She cites the example of a 74-year-old woman who used to share her home with her 94-year-old mother. But when the older woman went into a nursing home — taking her Social Security check with her and leaving the younger woman alone to make payments on a $207,000 loan — the woman lost the house.

“The hardest part for me, and what is very frustrating for me, is when I see senior citizens in this (situation),” Tulks said. “It’s disheartening, especially when you go to a sheriff’s sale. You sit there and listen to how 50 or so homes are being sold. It’s very sobering to know each home represents a family or person.”

Tulks said she knows a lot of people want to blame the homeowner for being ignorant of the process. But after looking over hundreds of loan documents as part of her work, she said she can honestly say that more people than not were taken advantage of.

“The biggest problem is lenders that preyed on the elderly,” she said. “They got sucked into loans thinking it’s the best thing for them, and they don’t know what to do.”

Home, at last

Moving into the modest home more than three decades ago changed Hunt’s outlook on life in more ways than she freely talks about with others.

Memories of her childhood are one unpleasant story after another. Telling just one illustrates the horror she lived for years, she said.

“I was 8 years old when I moved in with my worst foster parents,” she said. “They wanted a servant, not a child, and used a razor strap to beat me every time a chore was not done to satisfaction. I would cry myself to sleep with the family dog — my only friend in the house — licking my wounds.”

Moments like that shaped her life for years until — at age 15 — she gathered her belongings and ran away. She got a job working in a “greasy spoon” restaurant and used her meager wages to rent a room in a rundown motel.

The daily grind of surviving became her life until Hunt, then 19, met and fell in love with Roy Hunt Jr., whom she married in 1954.

They had four daughters but didn’t have the one thing Hunt said she always craved: a home of her own.

That is until, unbeknownst to her, her husband came up with a plan to buy his bride a home. He decided that the city of Lorain was where he wanted to raise his family, so in 1970, while Hunt and their daughters were visiting her brother in Indiana, Hunt went to look at a small, two-bedroom, ranch-style home that a buddy had told him about.

Hunt said he telephoned her that night saying he was coming to get her because she had papers to sign so they could buy the house.

And that’s how things stayed, even after she and her husband divorced.

The home was eventually paid off in the late 1990s, but in 2004, Hunt decided to take out a second mortgage.

She needed some money for bills, but she mostly wanted to pour everything into home improvements.

“We did the floors, new windows, new doors, a new bathroom and all kinds of stuff,” Hunt said. “I had my Social Security, and I was making good money watching kids in my home, so I could make the payments on the loan. I just wanted to have a nice home to live in until I died.”

In hindsight, she admits she was not as financially literate as she should have been when she signed the loan.

Her loans papers, included as evidence in her foreclosure lawsuit, spell out what type of loan Hunt received.

The words “adjustable rate” are boldly written at the top of the promissory note for the $87,000 loan. Payments of $610.17 began Aug. 1, 2004, and continued at that level until July 1, 2006, when the rate jumped 3 percentage points and changed her payment accordingly. Subsequent rate changes took place every six months thereafter at a rate of 1 percentage point per change until the interest rate topped out at 13.4 percent.

Hunt’s $610 initial payments eventually ballooned to close to $1,000. At the same time, Hunt, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, became so ill that doctors advised her to give up baby-sitting, leaving her to survive solely on her Social Security check of $1,058 per month.

“Even then, I kept paying the best I could,” she said. “I would pay the mortgage one month and not pay the utilities. It seemed like the mortgage was going up a little every month. I called the bank, but they said take out another loan. I couldn’t believe it. Before they raised my payments so high, I was right on the dot. They got their money every month.”

However, when talking about the specifics of the loan on Thursday, Hunt said she didn’t know the details spelled out in the fine print translated to higher payments for her.

The promise of low introductory payments and teaser rates made the subprime loans too attractive for some people to pass up, Groenstein said.

“We initially saw that type of lending a lot in the inner city,” said Groenstein, of Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People. “A lot of people got drawn in with that teaser rate. But now it’s gone beyond the inner city. It’s gone beyond subprime. It’s in rural areas, and it’s our grandmothers and grandfathers who are losing their homes.”

And when it comes to the elderly, a low rate is attractive because they typically have limited funds.

“However, if they don’t have the know-how to read and understand everything that is put before them, they are really at the mercy of the lender or the broker,” Groenstein said.

An uncertain future

The home Hunt could lose also is the home of her grandson, Marcus Hunt, a full-time college student.

“I brought Marcus to this house when he was 3 days old, right from the hospital,” Hunt said. “My daughter couldn’t raise him, and they wanted to put him in foster care. I couldn’t let that happen. I know what kind of life he would have had.”

At the time, Hunt said she was working a retail job. Not rich by any standard, Hunt said she took on the responsibility of her grandson with no hesitation and vowed to do whatever it took to keep a roof over his head.

“I managed with credit cards and accumulated a lot of debt in the process,” she said. “I messed up my credit, but I made it this far. I’ve got my boy raised and I kept a roof over his head.”

Watching his grandmother fight so hard for her home makes Marcus, 20, wish there was something he could do. Buying the house himself isn’t an option because he works only part-time at Marc’s in North Ridgeville while going to college.

“She told me how hard it was to pay the higher house payments, but she never told me they were going to sell our house,” he said. “I figure she was just trying to keep me from worrying.”

Her only prayer these days as she scours apartment listings is for someone to buy her house and let her rent it from them until she dies.

“I’m a nervous wreck,” she said. “I don’t sleep at night. I look at this paper every night for apartments, but I know I can’t afford it. When this thing first started, I called everybody, and it seemed that no one could help me. Bailing out me was not anyone’s plan.’’

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com.

 

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