Down the Up Escalator

by Barbara Garson

  But as soon as we turned onto Decatur, we were on a tree-lined block of nineteenth-century Brooklyn. Six-Sixty was one of the most elegant town houses on the street.

  No one answered on the parlor floor, but a male head emerged from the below-street-level door and told me that Susana Elsemeer was sleeping. I asked if I could speak to the co-owner, Samuel Elsemeer. “That’s me,” he said. “Susana is my mother.”

  Samuel, a large young black man, made me comfortable in the kitchen on the ground floor, or “servants” floor, and went to check on his mother. “She’ll be right down,” he reported. Susana Elsemeer soon scurried in, lively as a squirrel. At the mention of Judge Schack’s name, she seemed to do a delighted little skip-hop.

  Eager to be interviewed, Susana emphatically said, “I’ve lived in this house all my life,” giving me time to copy it down. But she quickly corrected the facile sound bite. “Well, I traveled a little, and I was married a little. But I’ve lived in this house”—she did the calculations—“maybe fifty of my fifty-nine years.”

  Her parents bought the house on the GI Bill in 1951, then raised their family and died there. At that time Susana was back living on Decatur Street with little Samuel. She had to buy her brother’s and sister’s shares of the house if she wanted to stay.

  “That was only fair,” she pointed out. Still, she couldn’t help remembering, “I did all the shoveling snow and the heating and that stuff while their names were still on the title.” She had also helped pay off her parents’ mortgage from her earnings as a freelance typist when Samuel was a toddler.

  “So I took out a mortgage loan to pay them off, and I used the leftover to replace all the windows. Then there was a water main break—that cost me $6,000 … later roofing, and then …” According to the foreclosure papers, there was a consolidated debt of $463,817.64 when Susana Elsemeer missed a payment in 2007.

  By then she was working as a school secretary and boarding foreign youngsters from a Manhattan language school to pay the mortgage. “Because I had a young man in the home, I chose to host young guys—from seventeen to twenty-five or so is what they sent. Samuel would take them out in the mornings to the subway and point them in the right direction. He still gets birthday cards from one of the French kids that we entertained.

  “It was very good money.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “One eighty-five a week for a room upstairs and two meals.”

  “Wait, you served breakfasts, worked full-time, and then cooked dinner every single night for a crowd of students?!”

  “Well, I’m a big cooker, Samuel will tell you. Some things I don’t know how to make small.”

  “Still,” I said, remembering my own single parenthood, “some nights you just want to eat a spoonful of peanut butter and sit there and stare.”

  “Especially when I was the suspensions secretary at the high school. I was stressed, stressed, stressed. But in the beginning Samuel helped me. If I was tired, I put a good face on it for the kids.

  “Then Samuel went off to the Job Corps to learn a trade and get his GED, and then I had the knee surgery, and then the recession came and the students dried up. First it got sporadic, but after Lehman Brothers and all that craziness the bottom dropped out. So at that point in time I was dealing with empty-nest syndrome and empty-pocket syndrome.”

  That’s when Susana missed a payment and began the process of negotiating a series of forbearance agreements with her mortgage servicer. A forbearance agreement allows a debtor to pay a lesser amount and defer the rest, plus interest, to an agreed later time.

  “What was it like dealing with Ocwen?” I asked.

  “Ocwen?” Angst came into her voice. “I was working at a high-stress job; I was taking an Access-a-Ride back and forth to Manhattan, sometimes traveling four hours a day. Then you get home and call Ocwen, and it says, ‘The waiting time will be an hour and a half.’ ”

  “They actually said an hour and a half?” I asked dubiously.

  “Do you remember that, Samuel? They would say, ‘Waiting time two hours,’ ‘Waiting time two hours forty minutes.’ So you take your food upstairs and sit at the phone after work; you sit on the weekends. I called for months, and they would put me in a queue.”

  “You must have gotten through to somebody, sometime?” I said.

  “Yes, and you know what happened. I’ll never forget that. I waited and I got to someone in Indian customer service, and he said he was going to transfer me to somebody else, and I said to him, ‘Please don’t put me back in that queue again.’ I said to him, ‘I have waited so long.’ I said, ‘Please, are you sure you’re going to connect me to a person?’ And he put me right back in the queue.”

  “This was at a time when you were going into another default?”

  “Yes. There was one time that I even had a check that sat in my dresser and I couldn’t get in touch with anyone.”

  “So how did you …?”

  “I wrote to the New York State Banking Department and—”

  “You needed the New York State Banking Department to contact your own mortgage company?”

  “What I found out is you don’t talk to customer service. What I found out is you’ve got to get through to the people who have the authority to make these decisions, and they did that. So this was a learning process.”

  “That must have felt terrible,” I said stupidly.

  “I felt like David facing Goliath, only I had no rock and I had no slingshot and I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if I had it. I felt small, powerless, put-upon, ignored—all of those good things.

  “But Samuel will tell you, I’ve stood and I’ve fought for this house for a long time. I’m smart and I’m educated, in certain ways, and if I’m determined to find something out, you’re not going to keep it away from me. I contacted the New York State Banking Department, and then the office of the ombudsman from Ocwen called me, and we worked out a forbearance agreement.

  “But it was a bad agreement because at that point in time I didn’t understand the difference between a forbearance and a loan modification.” A forbearance agreement temporarily lowers a monthly payment, but you still owe all of your remaining mortgage plus additional interest. A modification permanently changes the terms of the mortgage by lowering either the interest rate or, less frequently, the principal that’s owed. “Besides, I just wasn’t financially stabilized at that point. When I had the students, I could pay it; when I didn’t have the students, I couldn’t pay it. This was one of my darkest points. I was in an agreement, but I couldn’t keep it.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I stayed awake nights and I worried and I cried and I prayed and I did all that stuff. I thought about taking in foster children. I thought maybe it would be nice to have some older girls. You know, be a role model, a power woman. But I’m getting older. I mean, the interaction with the students was intense. You can imagine young girls and their problems and dramas. I said, ‘I’m going to have to do something; I’m going to have to declare bankruptcy. Let me first start out with a consumer credit counseling service.’

  “I was in such a state, I was so embarrassed. You know how they tell you to bring your bills. I had paper all over this place, and all I could do is take everything in a shopping bag. The lady would ask to see something, and I would just pull stuff out. I said, ‘I’m not usually like this; I’m a secretary. I work with paper all day long.’

  “Finally, she looked at the things and she said, ‘You’re asking for the wrong thing. This is not going to work. You have to go back and tell them that you need a loan modification.’

  “I got to be the queen of modifications and forbearances. I was in two forbearance agreements that I couldn’t keep, then a modification.

  “Then one August morning—schools were closed for the summer, and I was sitting upstairs worrying—a miracle came through the mailbox.

  “At that point in time I was current on my latest forbearance agreeme
nt, so I thought I was safe for another month. What I didn’t know until aftersight is just because I was in an agreement didn’t mean I was safe, because meanwhile they were going ahead with foreclosure, and rightly so.” Banks in modification negotiations reserve the right to continue with foreclosure and often go ahead. “So these two things were going along parallel with each other, and then out of the blue his decision came.”

  Susana Elsemeer may not have heard about the bank’s foreclosure petition, but she saw immediately that Judge Schack’s answer to it bought her time. But time to do what?

  “It took two miracles. If Judge Schack had said ‘fine’ and rubber-stamped it, everything would have been different. And the second miracle—maybe it was not the best of miracles …” Susana stopped herself short and directed her voice upward. “I’m sorry, God, I shouldn’t have said that.” Then she turned back to explain the lesser miracle to me.

  “What happened is, when I first got working, I didn’t officially work for the city. I officially joined the Department of Education in 1994. I wasn’t aware for a couple of years that I could change my pension tier. Tier one is the old-timers, and naturally they have the best deal. I put in for a conversion, which is, I worked for the city for fourteen years, but now I’d be given credit, in certain ways, for twenty years. It takes a long time, but sometime during that summer they must have juggled the numbers. In the fall I got a statement. I barely had any money because, naturally, I’d taken out loans on my pension all along. But suddenly my pension—not the 401(k) part, but the other part—had an available loan of like $11,000. At that point I knew for certain, I can manage.

  “You know something. To this day, and I am a woman of faith, to this day I don’t know why I got sent a copy of that decision. It didn’t make any sense at first, because I didn’t know I was in foreclosure.

  But I read those first couple of paragraphs, and I laughed myself to death. All the problems I had with Ocwen seemed to be distilled in those paragraphs. I just sat down, I called up my girlfriend, and we laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed because she knew everything that was going on with me and Ocwen. She has a little kid’s voice and she said, ‘He certainly seemed angry with them.’ And I said to her, ‘Let me tell you something, I don’t know what this is all about,’ I said, ‘but there’s something good in it for me because they were the bad guys and he just chased them all back to this little room. All those big banks in one little room.’ I was just so tickled.”

  I asked Susana if it had felt different to negotiate with Ocwen once she had the judge’s decision behind her. I expected her to crow about how fiercely she bargained once she had a rock for her slingshot. But instead her whole body seemed to sigh.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t start the telephone calls. I couldn’t start with the ombudsman’s office.” She appealed for my understanding. “I was seriously considering bankruptcy. I was ready to have a nervous breakdown. Emotionally, I couldn’t talk to Ocwen again. I just couldn’t. I wanted someone to do it for me.

  “So this last time I did some research on loan modification companies.” She must have seen my dismay. The newspapers were full of stories about crooked and useless modification schemes, and I would soon meet people who fell for them.

  “My friend who’s a realtor said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t pay anyone.’ But no one is walking around in your shoes. I did good research, and I found a company called Amerihope. They have a Web site. I paid them $1,200 in installments.

  “They told me that Ocwen was getting ready to foreclose again in court. I guess they had gotten it together, got their papers correct. I would have had to show up myself; I would have had to retain a lawyer for a lot more money than $1,200. These people went in, and they got me the last agreement, which I am getting ready now to make the third payment on. I got a letter in the mail saying that the charges against me, against the house and what not, they’ve been dropped.” Late fees and other charges connected with mortgage delinquencies can be flabbergasting. “I have the letter upstairs on my printer. And that’s how the last agreement happened.

  “And now that I have respectable, steady money coming in from three roomers and I had the money from the pension for a new down payment, I could make a payment plan that I can keep.”

  Susana’s new monthly payment of $2,900 is actually higher than some earlier negotiated payments, but it’s doable as long as she keeps collecting rent from the three single adult roomers that her friend in real estate helped her find. But the recession was dragging on. What if one of them loses a job? I wondered. Where would Susana find another miraculous cache of capital after borrowing the maximum from her pension? And how will she ever be able to retire?

  Susana and Samuel saw me out.

  “It’s too gorgeous,” I said, breathing the air on Decatur Street. “It’s going to be gentrified.”

  “Hey, they’re jogging with dogs already,” Susana responded. “I stood here this spring with my next-door neighbor—he’s been here like forever—and we saw them jogging with these little dogs, it’s like, ‘The pit bulls are going and the poodles are coming in.’ I’ve said to Samuel, someday he’ll be able to demand a million for this house.”

  “So his only way to enjoy the house may be to sell it?” I suggested.

  “We’re disputing with that now. I’m getting tired of the cold weather. But we’re not sure the neighborhood is gonna change quickly enough. I tell Samuel if he does get into those unions [Samuel was up for an apprenticeship program] and he’s making the money, then I’ll go get a little place somewhere where it’s warm and then come back and forth and maybe he’ll have a family and maybe not.

  “But it’s gotten so shabby.” She turned to look at the house. “The staircases need carpets, I want to redo the outside. Not with that stuff they used across the street.” She points to a house with modern siding. “My dream is one of these days I’ll be able to restore it to the way it was. Like on This Old House, the one they did on Sterling Place”—a Brooklyn town house that had had a televised restoration.

  “Anybody who knows me knows two things,” Susana said, summing up. “They know Samuel, and they know this house. That’s my life.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” says Samuel.

  “And we love it,” says his mother.

  The tiny black woman sweeps her arm back toward the Brooklyn town house and says, only half joking, “This is my Tara, and I swear I’ll never be hungry again.”

  Susana Elsemeer and I are small, wisecracking, middle-aged women with almost the same Brooklyn accents. We were both single parents, and we both spent our prime years managing the family’s finances alone. The big difference between our two financial systems was savings—or capital.

  Before my daughter was born, I had put away about $30,000 from a play I wrote. It was easy to save since I earned the money all at once. My system from then on was to put all my book advances (also earned all at once) in the bank and spend them as slowly as possible. I never had much more than $30,000 during my single years, but I was always ahead of the game.

  When my daughter broke a tooth, I paid cash; when Susana’s house broke a water main, she borrowed. That meant that the $6,000 repair cost her $10,000 or $12,000 or more as she paid it off. Meanwhile, she had that much less equity in the house.

  Susana borrowed on her parents’ house in order first to buy and then to maintain it. Then she borrowed from her pension (and not for the first time) in order to put enough cash back into the house to get a mortgage payment she could afford. She’s already hollowed out her two most obvious sources of savings, her house and her pension. How will Susana ever get ahead of the game?

  What about saving out of her wages?

  Even cheap as I am, I’m not sure I could have come up with a budget that would have allowed a school secretary to set aside enough cash to cover a mortgage of close to $3,000 a month in so deep a recession.

  Susana had deliberately rented through
a foreign school so she wouldn’t be dependent upon more economically insecure local renters, she’d told me. Though that is what she has now. But she considers them stable since her friend the realtor helped her to find them. Susana herself never mentioned being black or living in a black neighborhood as an economic problem. Still, she’d “diversified” in a manner that would leave her less vulnerable to black or even U.S. unemployment. But she hadn’t prepared for a global recession.

  When it came, the Elsemeer finances were precarious enough that despite a good union job (formerly known as a regular job) it took two miracles—a windfall of time plus a windfall of credit—for this single earner to save her house. But save it she did. And though she’s fallen behind a time or two since, she will keep it, I’m sure.

  I was still hoping to find someone who got his house free and clear because the bank couldn’t produce all the pieces of the sliced-and-diced mortgage. Frankly, I was a little disappointed that Susana hadn’t used Judge Schack’s decision to say, “Show me the mortgage—or at least, give me a lower interest rate.” But in fact, I had just seen the happiest housing outcome I ever would.

  I wish I’d taken a picture of Susana and Samuel Elsemeer waving from their town house steps. Judge Schack would love to see it. By the way, they asked me to convey their profound gratitude.

  Chapter Six

  BUBBLE BIRTH CONTROL

  With This Debt I Do Thee Wed

  A woman I know was worried about a relative with large student loans. I arranged to phone the young man in Minneapolis. Actually, he did the calling over his Skype, and though I had no video camera myself, I answered his ring and suddenly beheld the head and shoulders of a moonfaced man in his thirties with a modest and appealing smile.

  Karsten Lind teaches theater in a private high school; his wife teaches music. Together they earn about $100,000 a year, and they enjoy what they do. They must be good at it too, because neither of them has been out of work during the course of this recession. To make life even sweeter, they have a toddler that they both adore.