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74 company Safeguard Properties and Founder of Community Blight Solutions in Cleveland. "In most cases, [the problems are] caused by properties being vacant for a long time." TIME Any examination of how a community goes from shining light to hellish abyss needs to begin with a look at time. Indeed, the process is a slow rot from the time a property owner stops making payments on a mortgage, until the account becomes delinquent, and it becomes easier and cheaper for the property owner to just walk away. e typical amount of time for an unpaid mortgage to be considered delinquent is 45 days. But this, of course, is just the beginning. In the 20 states that have a judicial process for coping with foreclosures, once a property becomes abandoned, it takes about two years to complete the foreclosure process. "In some areas I've seen properties sit vacant for four years," Klein said. In those years between delinquency and the day the mortgage servicer (typically a bank) takes over the property, very little, historically, could be done. Banks, of course, do not own the mortgage, it belongs to agencies like Fannie Mae, HUD, or the VA, which, of course, means servicers can't do anything about the property until they legally own it—two to four years later. When a mortgage servicer finally does claim ownership of a property, it must secure the building. is, for the most part, is solved with a couple signs, some locks, and plywood boards for the windows. But then that's pretty much it. No other obligations really exist for vacant properties. When the recession gutted communities in 2009 and 2010, the number of properties people just up and left soared, which created a growing cottage industry of property preservation and maintenance companies. ese companies would be hired by the property owner to mow the grass, paint the windows, clean the yard, and generally make the property look like someone could be living there. All well and good, but the key thing to keep in mind here is that this only starts happening after the mortgage servicer owns the property. Which leads us back to that two-to-four-year gulf when no one is there. at's an awful lot of time for problems to fester. e windows get broken, either by kids with rocks, criminals with bad intentions, or flying branches in a storm. However the damage happens, it happens, and a house sitting there decaying is bad news for the neighborhood. A community sees a house with a broken window no one comes to fix, and people start to believe no one cares about the neighborhood, and it spirals down from there. Making matters worse, Klein said, is that it's often hard to know if a property's vacant in the first place. A house in disrepair could still be occupied. But everyone knows of that one house that, clearly, no one lives in, it just … sits there. Local governments, much less neighbors, rarely know exactly what's going on with a property because ownership is nebulous and hard to pin down. Even if city officials do find out who owns a dumpy old place no one has been to in months, the owner can easily say he's just on vacation. Beyond the attraction to criminals and being the embodiment of ghetto gloom, abandoned properties are a costly drain to local governments. According to Smart Growth America, 12,000 fires break out in vacant properties across the U.S. every year, and vacant properties generate nearly three times the number of calls for drugs and twice the calls about theft as occupied structures, thus sucking time and money out of police, fire and ambulance personnel, and saddling taxpayers with financing something nobody wants. Some states have, at long last, started doing more to combat zombie properties. In June, New York and New Jersey enacted legislation to eliminate the number of vacant properties by making mortgage servicers more forthcoming regarding the foreclosure process. e move is designed to stem the zombie plague and prevent properties from becoming eyesores. But neither the New York nor New Jersey measure strictly addressed the insidious effects of time between delinquency and full foreclosure. In fact, for Klein, these measures, while noble-sounding, miss the mark by putting the onus entirely on the servicer. A better solution, he said, is what happened in Ohio, which at the end of June the state's government signed off on House Bill 390, a.k.a., the fast- track to foreclosure. HB-390 cuts that two-year property coma down to as little as six months. Cutting the time it takes to foreclose allows the mortgage servicer to take possession of the property before it rots, Klein said. is, in turn, increases the chances that a property can be rehabilitated, sold and reoccupied. Important to note here is that the Ohio bill is not some Mr. Potter-like scheme to boot people out of their houses and build a servicer's real estate portfolio. No one is talking about kicking anyone out of anywhere, nor changing the locks for missing a mortgage payment‒‒something Washington State's Supreme Court recently ruled was illegal. If a property is occupied, fine, Klein says. Leave it be. e Ohio bill only targets properties that are verified to be abandoned, and that verification comes through a set of 12 specific checklist items such as unrepaired windows, word from neighbors, and signs of exterior damage. Once verified to be abandoned, the property needs to get into the hands of the servicer, which, contrary to popular belief, Klein said, doesn't want to own a string of broken houses. Banks want to sell the property and get it occupied again, which means it's in their best interest to fix it up to a livable condition and get it on the market as quickly as possible. Klein and his colleagues at Safeguard and Community Blight Solutions were major reasons Ohio's legislature voted 101-1 in favor of the fast track bill. Klein described countless sit-downs and meetings, presentations and explanations, phone calls and visits with lawmakers to get them to understand why it's important to get properties into foreclosure faster. Ironically, it took about three years of heavy education work to get those lawmakers to see the light, Klein said, but they eventually did. e important thing in this, however, is

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