“My parents are seniors and now you’re putting them out of their home,” said Nina Greene, 44, a retired New York City Police Department (NYPD) police officer who is physically disabled from a line of duty injury. She worked with the city’s evidence collection team, a skillset that has proved useful in her battle to try and keep her family home.
Despite her efforts, the Greene family has lost their years-long struggle to keep their house from foreclosure. Greene claimed that her parents were swept into a scam when they were unable to keep up with mortgage payments or get approved for a loan modification, and were summarily denied help from a long list of servicers that shuffled around the note to their mortgage. The housing courts disagreed and ruled in favor of the banks.
Her father, Larry Greene (Larry G.), 76, a now-retired Port Authority officer, and her mother, Sherry Greene, 75, purchased a two-level multi-family home in Long Island for about $550,000 in 2007. They originally hailed from St. Albans, a mostly Caribbean and African neighborhood in Queens.
The family decided to settle in Freeport, a similar village in Hempstead that is composed of predominantly middle- to upper-middle-class Black and Hispanic households. In 2023, the median property value there was over $470,000, and the homeownership rate was about 70%, according to DataUSA. Jamael Romans, a Black loan officer at United Mortgage Corp. in Woodbury, Long Island, estimated that homes are probably going for well over $700,000 in that area now.
“They have a good school district, so a lot of families want to be in that area,” said Romans. He added that Freeport, Baldwin, Hempstead, Uniondale, Elmont, and Westbury were all areas of middle- to upper-middle-class Black and Brown communities, but it’s also very competitive for first-time homebuyers to break into.
Outside the Greene family home is a lavish tree with pinkish blossoms, and an angel figurine in the yard is shrouded in greenery. Greene doesn’t quite describe that kind of tranquility inside, though. In addition to her and her elderly parents, her brother, his wife, and his newborn daughter also lived in the house. Not to mention their four rescue dogs and one cat.
Tranquil, it probably wasn’t — but it was theirs.
The issues began with their original mortgage holder, Countrywide Financial, said Larry G., who was the main person in charge of making payments on the mortgage at the time. He was denied a loan modification when the company went under, and he had a new loan servicer.
“When the crash came [in 2008], I got a notice that Bank of America would be taking over, so I started telling them that I wanted a new deal as far as the mortgage went, a lower interest rate, and they kept giving me the runaround,” he said.
Since the housing market took an economic nosedive in 2008 at the behest of unscrupulous companies, like Countrywide, the Greene family is far from alone in feeling the impact.
According to the Center for Ethical Organizational Cultures at Auburn University, Countrywide was the largest provider of home loans in the U.S in the early 2000s. It was also the primary provider of home loans to minorities in the nation. The company’s expansive growth was due in large part to subprime loans, a lending method that ultimately led to its and the country’s downfall. Basically, a subprime loan relies on lending to low-income or non-traditionally qualified borrowers but charges them higher interest rates. One of the tools of these loans is an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), where payments may start out low but balloon to exorbitant amounts over time.
Larry G. confirmed that he was paying only the interest on the mortgage, not the principal amount, for the first 10 years. “I didn’t realize, which I should have in the beginning, that the mortgage was a predatory type mortgage,” he said.
Bank of America (BOA) offered to buy Countrywide for $4 billion in 2008 — an acquisition that outlets like NPR called “a never-ending legal and financial nightmare.” Countrywide was under numerous investigations, including from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for misconduct and misrepresentation.
In the midst of all that chaos, Larry G. wanted to contest the company’s legal right to his mortgage in court and had stopped making payments because he couldn’t get a much-needed loan modification. In 2013, he went to court in Nassau County to find out who held the note on the mortgage. His total sum then was $417,000, according to court documents.
Meanwhile, BOA’s Countrywide unit had been found liable for defrauding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that same year. The federal government had sought $864 million from BOA for losses from defective loans that Countrywide sold, but ended up with a massive settlement.
Larry G.’s lawyer at the time said that BOA legally had five or six years to prove they held the mortgage and resolve the case. In the interim, the Greene family loan was assigned to a series of other servicers, first to GreenTree Loan Servicing, another servicer whose parent company, Walter Investment Management Corp. (WAC), merged with another WAC subsidiary, Ditech Mortgage Corp, in 2014. Washington outlets reported in 2016 that GreenTree had failed to honor many of the loan modifications in place when BOA sold them loans, leaving people frustrated and in debt.
The Greene family loan went to the U.S. Bank National Association, which had bought two of BOA’s securitization and trust businesses in 2010. Now it’s been with Rushmore Loan Management Services, LLC/Mr. Cooper, a registered service mark of Nationstar Mortgage LLC, since 2021, according to court documents.
“Mortgages … don’t stay within the same company over the life of the loan. The money has to continuously circulate within the economy,” said Romans. “That’s just the way it goes. And a new servicer is gonna handle the mortgage, because typically mortgage companies don’t handle servicing. Servicing is in charge of paying the property taxes, the home insurance, the principal and interest. If you had a great loan officer, they would have an operations team, and they will always know who the servicer is being transferred to.”
After years of back and forth, the Greenes were ruled against in their initial case and filed for appeal in 2019. The family kept trying to get a loan modification with each servicer and kept getting denied, they said.
By 2020, the COVID-19 crisis had severely delayed all court proceedings. When they resumed, the payments the Greenes owed had snowballed. According to documents, they had to pay more than $900,000 ($962,283.15) with interest at the note rate from March 1, 2011, to July 30, 2022. This figure does not include additional court and attorney fees.
The Greene family tried switching lawyers twice to file new motions and get a loan modification, but they were ultimately dismissed. They said they were told by Rushmore that they were short of qualifying for a loan modification by about $14 a month. Their home was foreclosed on and was set for the auction block in December 2024. The court also ruled for the dismissal of any future arguments that could be made in the case.
In a last-minute bid, Sherry G. decided to file for bankruptcy that month to stave off the auction until at least after the holidays. An auction can’t move forward until a bankruptcy case is concluded. “My mom thought this was her forever home,” said Greene. “She was just trying to do whatever she could do to hold it off, to see if we could find someone to help us, or whatever, and that didn’t pan out.”
Greene also tried filing complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the New York State Attorney General’s office, and Senator Siela A. Bynoe’s office.
“I think what happened is this problem was so widespread — trillions of dollars in mortgages throughout the country,” said Larry G. “And I think the problem with them holding everybody to the law is that it would have been such a huge economic blow that the courts stopped holding them to the letter of the law and people slipped through the cracks. And all the stuff I was hearing about, I imagine a lot of people just gave up and stopped fighting and maybe never even put up a fight.”
The Greene family’s bankruptcy case wrapped up last month, and the auction date was resumed for June 30, 2025. To circumvent that, the Greene family opted for a short sale.
Romans said a short sale is when a real estate broker comes in to work with the city to sell the home and negotiates a price, usually under value, to help relocate the occupants. These are more than likely cash buyers, which helps the house sell faster, he said.
“If a mortgage has become unaffordable for a person, it’s best to reach out to the mortgage company and let them know that you’re going through a financial hardship and you want to at least place a forbearance on your mortgage, where they pause the mortgage payment for at least three months and it won’t negatively affect their credit score,” advised Romans. “Throughout that time, you can focus on a game plan, or you can split the mortgage in two and make a payment twice in a month, or do a loan modification.”
Romans added that with foresight, the Greene family might have had an opportunity for a cash-out refinancing option. “Especially in this case — their home was in Long Island in the Freeport area. The homes are very high value,” he said. “If they were able to catch it in time and they knew they were tight on funds, they could’ve attempted to refinance, took out enough money that they needed to be able to get back in a more comfortable position.”
BOA’s senior vice president of media relations confirmed via email that Amsterdam News’ inquiry was received and said that her team was “still investigating” the inquiry and couldn’t get an official statement by press time. In the interim, she pointed to the publicly available legal court documents for clarity.
The media relations team Highwire Public Relations also confirmed receipt of the Amsterdam News inquiry via email, and said they were “looking into this” as well.
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