Extend foreclose ban for Maria vics: N.Y. controller

STATE CONTROLLER Tom DiNapoli is asking the feds to put a yearlong halt to home foreclosures in hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico.

In a letter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, DiNapoli said a moratorium on foreclosures of federally insured mortgages — which has been extended by 60 days until May — should be extended by a year.

“It is apparent that the residential mortgage delinquency and foreclosure problems in Puerto Rico, which resulted in large part from the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in late 2017, are unlikely to change significantly during that time,” he wrote of the May 18 deadline.

“Extending that moratorium by one year would allow a more realistic amount of time for property owners to achieve a measure of normalcy that could allow them to resume living in their homes and paying their mortgages.”

Earlier this year, the activist group Hedge Clippers and others asked the controller to halt new investments in private equity firms Blackstone Group and TPG Capital because of their ties to foreclosures in Puerto Rico.

But DiNapoli said the state retirement fund had little control over investment selection in private equity investments.

In letters to the two firms, he thanked Blackstone for urging HUD to do a one-year moratorium and asked TPG to do the same.

“Unfortunately, it is apparent that the crisis will not be resolved in the next 60 days,” he said.

HUD is preparing a response to DiNapoli’s request, a spokesman said. The agency initially imposed a 180-day moratorium on foreclosures and then extended it by another 60 days.

Hurricane Maria ravaged much of the northeast Caribbean last September, causing nearly $100 billion in damage and killing at least 100 people.

Puerto Rico was catastrophically impacted by the Category 4 storm — the island’s power grid was destroyed, leaving its 3.4 million residents in the dark for weeks — and many for months.