Teri Herold-Prayer and her teenage son have only lived in Lacey six months -- just long enough to be snared in one of the worst Catch-22s a working mother can imagine.
On April 3, a bank is going to sell the split-level home she rents in a foreclosure auction, and Herold-Prayer finds herself with two options: Tell her landlord she's leaving and forfeit a deposit of $1,275 that she can't afford to lose. Or skip paying her March rent and put the money on another place before the bank files to evict her.
It's a miserable choice, but one the 49-year-old state worker says she's going to have to make after discovering that her landlord, a woman who owns several properties in suburban Olympia, failed to make payments on the house and that, as the tenant, she has no legal right to end her rental agreement, which requires her to stay a year or lose her deposit.
With home foreclosures on the rise, more and more tenants are facing the same dilemma, say the Tenants Union of Washington and other housing advocates who plan to press legislators for bills helping renters like Herold-Prayer during a Housing and Homelessness Advocacy Day set for Feb. 24 in Olympia. In the meantime, "I'm the one that's out," she says. "I have no home, no money to move on, and I've been lied to."
Herold-Prayer rented the house Aug. 1 after moving from Pullman to Olympia for a job in which she maps the logistics of school emergency systems. After finishing graduate school at Washington State University, the divorced mother of three -- her two eldest are in college -- says it took every dime she had to swing the move and pay $1,275 each for the deposit and first month's rent on the three-bedroom home, which she found by answering a newspaper ad.
The owner seemed very friendly, she says, and the one-year deposit forfeiture clause in the rental agreement didn't seem like a problem because she wasn't planning on moving.
In November, however, she got a rude shock: Not only did her mother die unexpectedly, but when she came back from the funeral in Cheney, she found a notice from the lender tacked to the garage door stating that the house was in foreclosure.
"Needless to say, I was extremely upset," Herold-Prayer says. "I immediately called the owner and she denied it. She'd done some refinancing and wires had crossed in the mail and there was nothing to worry about, she said."
According to the notice, there was: It said the owner hadn't made a payment on the house since the day Herold- Prayer moved in. She let it go, she says, but on Jan. 3 a new notice appeared on the garage door announcing the April 3 foreclosure auction.
When Herold-Prayer called her landlord to ask about that, the response was "'I don't know what you're talking about,'" she says. "'Obviously, there's been some mistake at the courthouse.'"
Again, the owner told her there was nothing to worry about -- "just completely in denial," Herold-Prayer says. But, this time, she knew better and started making some phone calls to try to find out what her rights were. But, after getting referred to the Tenants of Union of Washington, she says, "Come to find out, I have none."
"Basically, they told me that I had to continue paying rent or I'd be in violation of my lease," she says. "So I'm stuck on this month-to-month [agreement] and can't get my deposit unless I'm here a year."
Herold-Prayer called the landlord again to tell her she really needed her deposit money to move, but the owner told her she didn't need to. She's left messages twice telling the landlord's Texas lender that she's a tenant in the house, but no one has returned her calls.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down to an auction on April 3. Sometime before then, an attorney told her, a 20-day notice would be posted on the house and, if she's not out before that expires, the bank will probably file papers in court to evict her. "I've never in all my years been evicted from a home," Herold-Prayer says, "and I'm not about to have
this happen to me."
"All I can do at this point," she says with resignation, is "send [the owner] a letter letting her know that she has my last month's rent for March" -- the $1,275 deposit -- "and I'll start looking for a new place ... I mean, what else can I do?"
The Tenants Union is seeking legislative relief for renters such as Herold-Prayer in House Bill 1942, legislation put forward by Rep. Tina Orwall, D-Normandy Park, that would give owners and tenants more notice in foreclosures on deeds of trust. The bill, which the House Judiciary Committee is likely to vote on Feb. 19 (with its Senate companion, SB 5810, to get a hearing Feb. 18), would require lenders to contact home- owners and explore alternatives to foreclosure prior to filing a notice of default.
It would also give tenants 60 days written notice to move after a foreclosure sale instead of the 20 days now required by law. Another bill that's headed for House Judiciary action Feb. 19 -- HB 1773 -- would give tenants being evicted for no cause 30 days to move if they've lived at the property less than a year or 60 days notice if more than that.
If Herold-Prayer can't get out before the bank files for eviction, another bill the Tenants Union is supporting would help her, but its prospects are quickly fading. The Fair Tenant Screening Act -- Senate Bill 5922 -- would prevent court records of no-cause evictions from being used to screen tenants and allow it to use the same credit report during an apartment search, preventing each landlord from charging $25 to $35.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, has yet to be scheduled for a hearing by the committee cutoff date of Feb. 25.
Herold-Prayer wants to be out well before any eviction papers are filed, but says none of the bills go far enough: The legislation doesn't require the bank or new owners to honor the term of the tenant's lease, she says, and does nothing to get her deposit back now, while she needs it to move.
"It's important that, once the house has gone into foreclosure, the tenant is given that refund," she says. "That's a lot of money for many of us -- that's our life savings. To take that from us and then to lead us along and lie to us I think is criminal."
"I feel like we are the silent victims of foreclosures," Herold-Prayer says of renters. "The homeowners living in the house being foreclosed on knows what's happening, but for all of us who are tenants and pay our rent every month, this is wrong."