North Hempstead Awarded $159K Grant to Combat Zombie Home Epidemic

The Town of North Hempstead has been awarded a $159,000 grant from the Office of the New York State Attorney General to address the decaying and abandoned foreclosure properties known as “zombie homes.”

The Attorney General believes these zombie homes have become a statewide problem. There were 2,084 zombie homes in Suffolk County and 1,960 in Nassau County in 2014, according to a 2014 Newsday study.

The study also found that “zombie homes” have cost Long Island at least $295 million in depreciated home values, while Long Island municipalities spent at least $3.2 million to clean, maintain and board up these properties in 2013.

The Town plans to use this funding to launch an educational program to help homeowners who are struggling with their mortgage payments. Their initiatives will focus on public outreach by sending informational written material to residential houses and reaching out to at-risk homeowners to make them aware of the resources available to them.

“Zombie properties have a debilitating impact on our communities,” Town Supervisor Judi Bosworth said in a press release. “It is our hope that by reaching out early to help some of these homeowners who may be facing difficulties in paying their mortgages, it will have a positive impact for them personally and for the community as well.”

Bosworth hopes the grant will allow the Town to help out struggling families before the “bank knocks on their door.”

The Town’s initiative will include:

• A Town of North Hempstead Zombie Properties Task Force that would consist of key stakeholders, including municipal agencies, local non-profits, faith-based groups, neighborhoods residents and others to collaborate on foreclosure prevention activates. Activities would include outreach campaign, identifying problem properties, developing strategies to address them and using resources to force the remediation and/or repurposing of the properties.
• A targeted outreach on existing homeowner retention resources where the Town will conduct outreach to local homeowners to promote use of local, regional, and state and national homeowner retention and zombie property prevention programs. Outreach will include mailings; targeted outreach, a dedicated webpage and a public service announcements.
• A local zombie and/or vacant properties database that will cross-reference with the New York State new vacant property registry. The data will be provided to the task force in the form of a list and map to help target planned interventions.

Funding for the statewide initiative is drawn from the $3.2 billion settlement agreement with Morgan Stanley that Schneiderman, as co-chair of the federal-state working group on residential-mortgage-based securities, negotiated in February, according to the AG. The settlement generated $550 million in cash and consumer relief for New Yorkers.

Image via Office of Steve Stern from an old Patch article