Housing Woes Hit Multifamily Owners

Boston Herald (06/02/08)
In some parts of the country, multifamily housing owners are getting hit hard in the residential property slump partly due to lending standards that are more stringent than those for single-family properties. Massachusetts, which has more than 200,000 two- and three-family properties often known as "triple-deckers," has recorded the steepest decline among the three southern New England states where such homes comprise substantial chunks of the overall housing supply. While sales of single-family residences in the state fell 10 percent last year, sales plunged 35 percent for two-family homes and 43 percent for three-families. The multifamily housing woes have forced many residents who rent out of their dwellings along with the owners as mortgage firms have the legal right to force tenants out even if they have met their lease obligations. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Washington-based affordable housing advocacy group, estimated in May that at least 45 percent of the housing units in the final stage of foreclosure in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island were occupied by renters whose owners had fallen behind on their mortgage payments.