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