Thomas Breen photo
Teresa Fernandez outside her soon-to-be-former home.
Teresa Fernandez and her two young kids plan on moving across the Hill to an apartment on Congress Avenue next month, now that the bank has foreclosed on their rented single-family home in City Point.
Fernandez and her son and daughter were still inside 286 Greenwich Ave. at noon on Saturday at the same time that a foreclosure auction was scheduled to take place on the property.
No prospective bidders wound up showing up for the sale. That means that the 121-year-old house will remain in the hands of Wells Fargo Bank, which foreclosed on previous landlord Juan Jimenez’s mortgage in September. (While the original 2006 mortgage on the property remained in Jimenez’s name, Jimenez quitclaimed the property’s ownership in 2014 to Sandra V. Freire Silva, who was the legal owner of the building until the court-ordered foreclosure this fall.)
286 Greenwich Ave.
Still in her pajamas Saturday morning after another long week working as a cleaner at a nearby Target retail outlet, Fernandez told the Independent that she and her kids have lived in the rented three-bedroom house on Greenwich Avenue for the past year.
She said she was born in the Dominican Republic, and raised in City Point and the Hill. Her parents still live right next door on Greenwich Avenue.
Fernandez said she has lined up a two-bedroom apartment on Congress Avenue for her family to move into in December.
“I feel fine” about moving, Fernandez said, because of how rundown her current rented home is.
286 Greenwich’s front entryway …
… basement stairwell …
… and upstairs hallway.
She pointed to peeling paint on the front entryway’s ceiling, chunks of plaster missing from one of the bedroom walls, and water stains on the stairwell leading down to the basement.
The worst part of the house?
“It has a lot of mice,” she said.
“The house is not good.”
Fernandez said that she and another tenant at 286 Greenwich Ave. had an arrangement with the landlord whereby Fernandez paid for gas and electricity, and the other tenant covered the $1,200 monthly rent. She said she has kept up with her utility payments, but is not sure if her housemate has kept current with rent.
She also said that the landlord, Silva, lives in Ecuador, and comes to New Haven to visit only a few times a year. She said her landlord had given her a heads up before Saturday that the house had been foreclosed on, allowing her and her family time to seek out a new apartment elsewhere in the city.
Court-appointed “committee” Theresa Behrens.
Parked outside of the Greenwich Avenue house midday on Saturday was Theresa Behrens, the court-appointed attorney—or “committee”—charged with overseeing the foreclosure sale.
Behrens said that she received five or six inquiries from prospective bidders on Friday.
One investor with New York license plates traveled up to City Point to take a tour of the house earlier on Saturday morning.
He wound up not sticking around for the auction, Behrens said, after seeing the worse-for-wear state of the property and after learning that the bank had set an opening bid of over $112,000.
According to the original foreclosure complaint filed in state court back on March 18, 2020, Jimenez took out a $104,000 mortgage on 286 Greenwich Ave. in August 2006 from H&R Block Mortgage Corporation. That was three years after he bought the property in 2003 for $90,000.
The complaint states that H&R Block Mortgage Corporation assigned Jimenez’s mortgage to Option One Mortgage Corporation in 2005. American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., which bought Option One in 2008, then assigned Jimenez’s mortgage in 2009 to Wells Fargo Bank as the trustee for Option One Mortgage Loan Trust 2007-1, Asset-Backed Certificates, Series 2007-1.
According to the complaint, Jimenez had defaulted on the mortgage after not paying monthly installments of principal and interest dating back to November 2019.
The September 2021 notice of judgment of foreclosure by sale in the case indicates that Jimenez owed over $101,000 in total debt on the mortgage as of mid-August.
Since no one wound up putting in a bid on Saturday, Behrens said, the property will remain in the hands of the bank.
She said she’ll now report back to the plaintiff as to what she learned about the property during Saturday’s visit, and provide a list of recommendations as to what it needs to do now as it seeks out a new buyer for 286 Greenwich.
At the top of the list: “weatherize” the building to protect it from the snow, ice, and winter weather to come.
Wouldn't it be nice if the City had a program to purchase and repair the house and sell to a residential owner to maintain affordable housing. No tax abatement needed.