United States | News & Politics

Imagine this: You’ve been living in your house for years, perhaps even decades. Then, one day, you get a call or a letter or a knock on your door and find out that your house is about to be foreclosed on.

Over the last few years, more than 100 people in Connecticut have been in this situation, according to Jeffrey Gentes, an attorney with the Connecticut Fair Housing Center who gives legal advice and representation to people experiencing or fighting foreclosures.

Gentes testified in front of the Connecticut Banking Committee on Feb. 13, 2025, about proposed bill HB6878, An Act Concerning Mortgage Foreclosures and Undischarged Mortgages.

During his testimony, Gentes said that the Fair Housing Center has heard from more than 100 people in the last two to three years who learned they didn’t own their homes as they thought and were threatened with foreclosures. Almost everyone who goes to the Fair Housing Center is referred there by another attorney first, meaning that this is far from a comprehensive number, he said.

Right now, there are potentially hundreds of Connecticut residents who signed mortgage agreements between 2004 and 2008, and think that they’ve paid them off, but have not.

These people are victims of “zombie mortgages:” a mortgage where the lender stops collecting payments for years and stops sending notices, then tries to reclaim the house after equity has accumulated or the property has increased in value.

“They were written and loaned out, and then they stopped collecting on them for, sometimes up to 20 years,” Loraine Martinez Bellamy said. Like Gentes, she is a housing attorney with the Fair Housing Center. “So, as these loans pop back up, they’re putting many homeowners at risk of foreclosure and at losing their homes based on loans that they thought had been settled or released, or forgiven in the past.”

Presently, the Fair Housing Center is representing around two dozen people dealing with zombie mortgages, but Gentes estimates that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases being handled in courts in Connecticut right now.