Christmas Day 2014 Snail Mail Letter to President Obama and NYS Governor Cuomo: Greetings, This is the third holiday season that my family and I have been displaced from our Hurricane Sandy destroyed home in Rockaway Park, NY. We have not been able to rebuild, repair, nor replace the home because of the criminal negligence of our flood insurance carrier, Nationwide Insurance, who severely underpaid the claim, which was based on detailed contractor estimates and engineering reports. We registered with NYCs Build it Back program, when it was announced that it was intended to help close the gap left by insurance. We have only received endless delays and excuses from them, even though we were finally told, in August of 2014, that our home qualified for a full rebuild and we were Priority #1. So far, nothing has happened and there is no timeline for action. My husband and I are small business owners who worked from home. Prior to the October 29,2012 storm, we were model citizens, comfortably and promptly paying our mortgage with added principal, carrying all of the homeowner, flood and wind insurances, and no debt. We created jobs in the community and patronized local businesses. We carried $350K worth of flood insurance. The estimates to rebuild the house ran around $200K. Our contents loss was $75K. After getting nowhere, we retained legal counsel during December 2012. By February of 2013 we received $32K for the house and $12K for our contents. And that was it. We have been involved in the lengthy morass of legal proceedings since. After 3 months of being houseguests after the storm, and no progress with the insurance situation, it was obvious that we needed to rent a place to live and work. Although we were supposed to be on a non-derogatory Disaster Relief Moratorium through our mortgage bank, Chase, they reported us as delinquent. No one would rent to us in NYC, our home city of 30 years, and my husbands birth place. We had to go out of state to Philadelphia, in order to rent a house, where we have been since February 2013. We regrouped, restarted our business, and paid the mortgage on our destroyed home until June 2013. By then, with no end in sight, it was unsustainable for us to pay rent and pay the mortgage - so we stopped paying on the mortgage. We kept trying to get to stay in the Disaster Relief Moratorium . Sometimes we were in, and then suddenly we would be out. The bank, Chase, was as unhelpful as possible, with contradictory letters, never being able to speak with the same person twice, keeping us on hold for hours at a time, etc. Finally, after we were yet again told that we would be on the Disaster Relief Moratorium, I received a letter that said that I requested to be off of it. Our mortgage was then sold out to a collection agency. Even though our lawyer interceded, he was not able to get the mortgage back to the bank. Meanwhile, we have finally entered the discovery phase of the legal proceedings. We were first told that there would be a mediation meeting between our attorneys and Nationwide in January 2015 - now that date is not fixed - I am now told that maybe it will happen in February. Concurrently, all of a sudden, the collection agency wants to move ahead with foreclosure, and we are told that if that happens, the bank can come after what little money we do have - so that we can be completely and totally ruined. Our attorney is advising us to prepare for a deed in lieu of foreclosure - because even though we have piles of seemingly irrefutable evidence in our favor, he is unsure of how the mediation will turn out. It seems that even big legal teams do not carry the amount of power required to combat such enormous entities like Nationwide, FEMA, and Chase (and SPS, their collection agency). It is appalling that we, as homeowners, are held responsible for our contractual obligations, while the very institutions that we made the contracts with are not. Chase escrowed our insurance money, and paid Nationwide their due, each month, for the seven+ years before the storm that we owned this house. When Nationwide failed to honor their contract, Chase said they had nothing to do with it. But now, as things come to a head, they do seem to be working together to finish us off. Remarkably enough, if the bank forecloses on the home, the legal case gets thrown out! I am told by an independent building company that specializes in hurricane resistant homes, who I was planning to hire, that the actual sustainable rebuilding of my 400 sq ft bungalow would take about 1 month once all of the permits were in place. BIB says it would take over a year. I see new and much larger construction go up in one- two months all of the time in NYC and Phila. Taking a year to rebuild is just another ploy. BIB says they cant get the building permits because of environmental hazards on a neighboring property; the DOB and EPA say that is nonsense. My lawsuit never seems to really be coming into resolution. There is always another term like discovery or disclosure that requires another 30 days of waiting for a response. Meanwhile the bank/collection agency threatens foreclosure. It is a race to see who wins, while we just lose. When you follow the money, it looks like the banks, the insurance companies, FEMA, and NY State in the form of Build it Back, are all in collusion to defraud as many homeowners as possible - and essentially seize the land for bigger projects in the future. FEMA, which is the federal government, backs the flood insurance program. It was also the federal government who funded the Build it Back program. If the insurance companies, acting for FEMA, stall insurance payments, and BIB simply just stalls, then many homeowners will eventually lose their properties - those properties going back to the bank, or to the government - then later down the line, the derelict lands will be sold to big developers, new higher cost developments constructed in the form of luxury housing, hotels, or casinos, which will yield more tax and insurance revenue. So, I am writing to you, so that you, whom I actually voted for, can prove me wrong in thinking that the institutional reaction to this storm is an elaborately and cruelly orchestrated land grab. Instead of being compassionately helped through a bad situation, we, as homeowners, are being hunted, tortured, and threatened. Instead of all systems and parties acting with haste to restore us and our home (and that of the other 217,000 folks who are involved in lawsuits), there have been endless delays, false engineers and adjusters, and a government and legal system mired in so many procedures, that it is impossible for mere mortals to wait them out. One can hardly call two years, quickly becoming three, a timely resolution. What I would like from you, is something in the order of divine intervention, or humane practical intelligence. Please: Stop the foreclosure proceedings. Make it impossible for banks to foreclose on properties/homeowners when there is an active legal case in process. Force Nationwide/FEMA to honor the policy which we paid for, and give us the money that we need to rebuild the home. OR if the Build it Back Money is really supposed to bridge the gap with the flood insurance, lets get to it and rebuild promptly. (But the foreclosure proceedings still need to be stopped). Once the home is habitable, let us pick up the mortgage where we left off - add the missed time to the end of the mortgage. We loved our home, we loved our life. We paid our bills, we created business in the community. The storm was a very scary 7 hours of being in water (yes we were in our house during it). But the rest of this ongoing institutionalized torture has been man-made. Please stop the torture. Please help us resolve this situation. Please help us get the insurance that we paid for. Please help save our home.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 21:57:05 +0000
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