Cook County Sheriff Suspending Mortgage Foreclosure Evictions

UPDATE

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is helping to uphold state law with his eviction moratorium:

People will be required to get the legal notice that they should've gotten before they were thrown out of their homes. It's a good thing that the sheriff is going to work to follow the law.

Listen to Madigan's remarks here.

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UPDATE

A mortgage lender filed suit against Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart Thursday to force him to resume evicting people from foreclosed homes, Mark J. Konkol reports in the Sun-Times:

Accredited Home Lenders filed a lawsuit Thursday to get Dart to obey an order that calls for the eviction of Shirley McFarland of Dolton from her foreclosed bungalow.

"Sheriff Dart may have concerns about the orders that he is charged with enforcing, but he simply cannot refuse to carry them out. The orders of the court must be enforced," attorneys for Accredited Home said in a statement. "This lawsuit is necessary to ensure that."

Dart also met with Cook County Judge Dorothy Kirie Kinnaird to discuss having banks file an affadavit stating that residents have been given fair notice before evictions. Dart had previously said that his attempts to have the state legislature pass similar provisions went nowhere.

Story continues below

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Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart will suspend all mortgage foreclosure evictions beginning Thursday, he announced today.

"These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don't care who's in the building," Dart said in a statement. "They simply want their money and don't care who gets hurt along the way. On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We're not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We're just not going to evict innocent tenants."

The suspension is a response to the soaring number of evictions in the County, many of which are of renters oblivious to their landlord's mortgage failure, according to Dart's statement. The sheriff's office expected to conduct foreclosure evictions at 4,500 properties this year, compared to 1,771 in 2006.

Comments

[crewmaster]

Applause, applause, applause to the sheriff.

[DuPageDem]

Smart move. Authorities often refused to enforce evictions during the First Great Depression, for very good reasons. Among them: Sometimes the homeowners shoot back.

[thebigthinker]

"Sometimes the homeowners shoot back." To be called a homeowner you have to own the home and not own a mortgage that you do not pay for.