New Haven Independent: Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti's Empire

Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti’s Empire

by Melissa Bailey | September 25, 2007 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It was another day in court for New Haven’s Foreclosure King, as a judge ordered one of the biggest, most controversial landlords in town to turn yet another blighted property over to the bank.

Anthony Perrotti wasn’t personally in Superior Court on Church Street Monday, but his lawyer was. His name has been on the foreclosure docket almost as regularly as the cockroaches roam his New Haven apartments.

Meanwhile, the Fair Haven house in this photo is one more blighted property that New Haven will have to wrestle with in the wake of Perrotti’s growing list of foreclosure cases.

Perotti and his Milford-based Ottowa Enterprises LLC own and rent over 50 homes in transient areas of New Haven.

After amassing 240 apartments in the greater New Haven area and Bridgeport, Perrotti has seen that empire pummeled with a steady hail of foreclosure lawsuits over the last year. Perrotti’s troubles come as a foreclosure crisis throws the city’s housing stock in flux: 1,207 New Haven homes were currently in various states of foreclosure as of Monday, according RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosure properties.

In addition to the strain of a collapsing housing market, Perrotti is under financial pressure from a state lawsuit that accused him of scamming customers through his Milford-based ABC Alarm Company. (Click here to read the suit.) Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called Perrotti and others at his company “con artists” for allegedly defrauding customers on 26 counts, including refusing to repair defective equipment and forging signatures to lock consumers into long-term contracts. In November 2006, Perrotti and a business partner agreed to pay $225,000 to settle allegations.

“Infamous” King Of The Court

Perrotti didn’t bother to show up at Monday’s hearing in New Haven Superior Court, where each week Judge Juliett Crawford sorts through a new list of properties threatened with foreclosure. Despite numerous phone calls, the landlord could not be reached for comment as of press time.

“I haven’t seen him here once,” remarked long-time foreclosure attorney Valerie Finney of Hunt Leibert Jacobson. But Perrotti’s name has popped up so many times in court, she said, that “he’s become infamous.”

By now, the landowner must be all too familiar with the drill.

Within the past year alone, a total 52 of the homes Perrotti owns in New Haven have entered the foreclosure system, landing him with matters before court each week.

In most cases, the landlord searches for a buyer to take the property off of his hands and seeks foreclosure by sale.

At 280 Poplar St. (pictured above), however, sinking property values left Perrotti with no way out. Since he bought the property in 2005 for $200,000, the property value has fallen to $165,000, according to a court-ordered appraisal. Perrotti got behind on mortgage payments, racking up almost $197,000 in debt to LaSalle Bank. That’s more than the house is worth.

“He was under water,” noted attorney Finney, who’s representing LaSalle in the matter. Even foreclosure by sale would not have dug him out of his hole, so Judge Crawford made a judgment for strict foreclosure, turning the property over to the bank.

The Poplar Street property, a boarded-up three-family home with a rusty fire escape in the front and a stranded shoe on the porch, has been vacant for “a while,” neighbors said. It’s the fourth of Perrotti’s buildings — all in the Fair Haven section of town — that have been taken by strict foreclosure this year, three of them this month.

The timing of Perrotti’s troubles coincides with a dramatic spike in foreclosure actions this year. The number of legal proceedings filed against residential homeowners has jumped 85.1 percent, from 121 in the second quarter of 2006 to 224 in the second quarter of 2007, according to The Warren Group. The situation is expected to get worse in coming months, when thousands of Connecticut homeowners with adjustable-rate sub-prime loans are scheduled to get hit with a sudden hike in interest rates.

The effect of the Foreclosure King’s misfortunes on the city remains to be seen. The turnover of blighted homes may be a positive change: The Mutual Housing Association, who transformed the block across the street from 280 Poplar St., said they’d “definitely” be interested in the property.

But foreclosed homes could also fall into the hands of out-of-town flippers looking to make a quick buck. “It could cause some additional vacant property,” noted Andy Rizzo, director of the city’s Livable Cities Initiative. As new landowners sweep in to buy up foreclosed properties for cheap, Rizzo said his department would “be on the lookout” for blight.

A 2006 Advocate article described Ottowa properties with roach-infested rooms, urine-soaked stairs and crack addicts sleeping in the hallways (click here to read it).

Previous Independent coverage of New Haven’s foreclosure crisis:

She’s One Of 1,150 In The Foreclosure Mill

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Comments

Posted by: Frank Iezzi | September 25, 2007 2:09 PM

And why can't the Public Housing Authority buy these properties for pennies on the dollar to rehab?

Posted by: PowertothePeople | September 25, 2007 3:00 PM

Quality housing by these large landowners is a problem all over this city. I hope Ottawa looses every peice of property they own. Then we can go after others like Apple Management and all those other folks who only buy property only to make a buck. The quality and stability of our communities is sacrificed so that they can keep their homes in Fairfield County. They do only the minimal amount of repairs to keep them from getting fined by LCI and have little or no oversight on who they allow to rent the properties. The city should step in and start trying to create more resident homeowners. If you live in the house you are more likely to take care of it. Where are the management teams? Where are the neighbors? Why isn't anyone screaming about this? When big time developers like Intercontenental and
Becker and Becker come in and want the sweet deals to build in our neighborhoods we should demand that they contribute more to the stabilization of our neighborhoods. You want zoning approval? Then kick in a couple 100k to a homeownership program.

Posted by: kris | September 26, 2007 3:10 PM

Why are new haven residents always looking for some big company to kick in money to things like homeownership programs after school activities and blah blah blah.You want to own a home? Great! First get a job second save money and then you can buy a home.Nobody is stoping you except yourself.You talk about people taking better care of their property if they owned the home instead of renting,well then buy it and fix it up.Let me tell you, 50 years ago new haven didnt look like it does now.Who do you want to blame for the garbage,roaches and urine soaked hallways?Its not the landlords urine bugs or garbage.These places werent in this bad of shape when first rented otherwise people wouldnt have bothered to rent right?Its these tenants that have no respect for other peoples property.Stop looking for hand outs all the time.Maybe these kids that are so poor and have nothing to do all summer(again not the parents fault its everybody elses fault) can pitch in and clean up the neighboorhoods that THEY trashed.Ill buy the flowers and lawn mowers and you see how many tenants want to spruce up the houses themselves. Gimme a break my old italian family grew up in those neighborhoods and they were clean and safe back then AND IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH HANDOUTS FOR MILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES.Life is what you make of it....I bet its also the lanlords fault new haven is so unsafe too since they rent to these people right.Oh yeah i forgot we are blaming the police dept for that problem...again not the parents fault.New haven is one of the only places you can live and blame everyone else for your problems and expect them to fix all your lifes mistakes.

Posted by: cedarhillresident | October 1, 2007 9:11 AM

PowertothePeople
Apple just bought one in Cedar Hill, we are keeping a close eye on them, because of there rep. But they did make a major improvement to the outside of the property, they are out there cleaning the whole block once a week. So right now we are trusting them but not letting our gaurd down. Our problem is with Rock and State LLC a managment company on whalley runs it right now I have garbage sill over the dumbster for more than a week now. There recidents our dealing and one of the comc. tenent is up to know good and are being watched. So ya see LCI Should be watching theres places I thought they needs a licence of some sort if they had more than 6 apts in one building??

Posted by: Walt | October 1, 2007 10:45 AM

Well said KRIS

My Irish-American famuily went through similar experiences, but did not have your added problem of starting out with a foreign language.

I'll admit that a brogue is sometimes almost as hard to decipher as Italian.

Problem started in the 1960's when it seems each rabblerouser (remember the names Covington or J'Royd Green?) was given a "non-profit" to run, and paid a large salary to shut up.

Financed by well- meaning Yale, First NH National Bank, SNETCO, the C of C and others. Even with those donations, rabblerousers physically locked up City honchos (plus me) in a Hill area school to make sure it was they who got credit for and used the money which had actually been negotiated by a peaceful activist Black teenager kid to help folks in need , ( last name Murray).

If Murray is still around, he is probably approaching 60, and likely a community leader,

Well-meaning but they established a bad precedent.

Posted by: James M. | October 3, 2007 1:15 PM

There are nightmare tenants and there are nightmare landlords. Read the accompanying article above about Perrotti and it is clear he is a blatant example of one of the latter.

I also grew up in New Haven. The thing is, at that time, a much higher % of the neighborhoods consisted of owner-occupied homes. Laying the blame on tenants for properties being "trashed" as compared with the past is only part of the story.

In say, 1965, how many city homes were owned by out-of-town "investors", property flippers and the like? Comparatively few. There was an enormous wave of greed created by the 80's property boom, and a resulting higher frequency of slumlords who focused only on profit and failed to spend a dime on maintenance. Human nature 101: if a building has faulty heat, plumbing leaks, roach infestations, mold everywhere, drug dealers using the vacant apartments, and the landlord sits in his comfortable suburban McMansion and does nothing, the property is going to go to hell, period. It's not always the tenants' fault.

In the days when the landlord lived on the first floor of your typical three-family, this obviously wasn't going to happen.

As far as powertothepeoples comments, absolutely the city should get whatever it can out of developers who want to build here. Whatever form that takes is negotiable. To call that a "handout" is patently absurd. Orange or Madison don't do the same?

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Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti’s Empire

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