Eviction takes elderly woman by surprise

Three weeks ago, Dorothy DeBose was given 10 minutes to vacate the house she’s lived in for most of her life. The 76-year-old retired phone company employee was slow gathering what she needed because she kept thinking about the cat she feeds in the backyard. She called her nephew, Omar Taylor, who lives in the unit attached to the house.

Taylor was confused. He called the eviction specialist the family had hired to delay DeBose losing her home until the eviction could be challenged in court.

DeBose left without her medication, wallet and financial documents. The locks were changed. Her furniture and clothes — just about everything — are still inside the white house with a gabled roof on Bancroft Avenue in East Oakland.

Taylor tried to calm her, but she kept worrying about the cat.

“That’s her only solace to go feed her cat out there,” Taylor said. “Her health is deteriorating. It was a very big shock on her system.”

Oakland’s housing crisis is more than skyrocketing rental prices. DeBose, who was trapped by a risky pay-option mortgage, fell behind in payments and had her house snatched so quickly that she didn’t learn the house had been foreclosed and sold until the eviction process began.

A predatory loan cost an

elderly woman her home.

She inherited the house from her mother, who died in 2009. DeBose paid the mortgage for seven years as the loan changed banks through acquisitions — from Oakland’s World Savings Bank to Wachovia to Wells Fargo Bank.

It was DeBose’s mother who had taken out a pick-apay loan, which allows borrowers to choose among several payment options, including a minimum that doesn’t cover interest. And once the principal reaches a certain level, the mandatory payment jumps. The adjustable-rate mortgages have left many homeowners vulnerable to defaults, and the lending practice has produced high foreclosure rates.

Between 2007 and 2011, there were more than 10,500 completed foreclosures in Oakland, according to the Urban Strategies Council, an organization focused on eliminating poverty.

Foreclosures that lead to evictions haven’t stopped.

When her sister died in early 2016, DeBose, who never married and has no children, paid for the funeral. That led her to miss a few months of payments. When she resumed paying, the checks were returned. The house was auctioned on Oct. 31, according to Redfin, a real estate database. It was purchased for $347,100 by a property management company in San Leandro. (More about that in another column.)

On Wednesday afternoon, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a tenant activist group, protested the eviction on the front lawn of DeBose’s house. Neighbors stopped by to offer support.

Taylor, 44, first learned about the eviction in December. I asked him if DeBose had sought or gotten relief from the December 2010 agreement for Wells Fargo to make $2 billion in loan modifications for California homeowners with pick-a-pay mortgages that Wells had purchased from other banks. He said no.

He’s still trying to put the pieces together.

“There is so much that we have to iron out, but this house should never have been in a position where it could be foreclosed,” he said as he flipped through a tattered folder bursting with crimped paper.

DeBose has moved in with Taylor. Because he had a lease agreement with DeBose that established him as a tenant, he gets to stay in the attached unit — for now. The property management company is taking him to court, and he’ll find out next month if he can continue renting the space.

DeBose spends most of her time in a room. The belongings she managed to grab are stuffed into plastic bags at the foot of the bed. As I talked to Taylor, she ambled into living room wearing a teal cardigan, a loose paisley blouse and beige trousers.

She sat quietly, rolling her reading glasses in her hands. She spotted a speck of dirt on the wood floor and crouched to wipe it away with the tissue she had balled up in her hand. Then she went outside to feed the cat. There are two, but only one cat eats because the other is so independent. The cats don’t have names. “He or she doesn’t have one,” she told me, laughing. “They come under the back fence when they were babies.”

Before he spoke to protesters, Taylor draped his arm around DeBose’s shoulder and asked if she was OK.

“No, but I’m standing,” DeBose said.

It wasn’t long before she went inside to sit down.