NEW BEDFORD — The little ranch-style house was boarded up and the grass was overgrown. Squatters had been in and out. Trash and at least one needle were scattered in the backyard. A bank owned the property, but seemed to have forgotten about it.
City housing officials made yet another visit to the house one recent morning. Jordan Latham, the city’s vacant property development manager, noticed someone peek through the curtains of the house next door.
“Hi! We’re with the city!” she shouted as she waved and hurried over.
Bouchra Msatfi emerged in a multicolor maxi dress and a gray headwrap. It was as if she had been waiting for this moment.
“We’re suffering,” she said. She was terrified of the squatters. Three of them were coming and going from the vacant house, doing drugs, knocking down her fence, breaking into her shed. “I am worried about my children.”
For the past year and a half, it has been Latham’s job to get vacant properties like this one back into use. Under her watch, dozens of empty houses across the city have come back on the market. Latham says she’s helped several property owners and their heirs overcome legal and financial obstacles they couldn’t tackle on their own.
This bank-owned house has been one of Latham’s biggest challenges.
Latham asked question after question. When was the last time Msatfi saw the squatters? Did she call the police? What did the squatters do in her backyard?
Msatfi wanted to know what the city was going to do.
“We’re taking it really seriously,” Latham said.
Latham and her team started brainstorming on their ride back to the office.
“We need an urgent strategy over there,” said Josh Amaral, the city’s director of housing and community development.
They sent police and code enforcement officers that same day to further board up the house, sealing the openings the squatters had slipped through. They called the bank again, demanding that it sell the property as quickly as possible. They asked homeless outreach workers to start monitoring the house to see if the squatters came back. And they made a plan for the state attorney general’s office to appoint a receiver to take responsibility for the property if the bank doesn’t act soon.
The properties that stay vacant the longest often need this kind of intensive intervention, officials say. They have problems — usually legal ones — that the private market can’t solve. That’s why the city created Latham’s position in 2023 as part of its housing plan.
“This was like half of a function of half of a department,” Amaral said in an interview. “Now that we’re able to put more eyes on it, we’re able to spend time developing systems that more adequately address it and track the success of what we’re doing over time.”
About 215 properties are on New Bedford’s vacant building registry, down from 399 two years ago. Credit: Grace Ferguson / The New Bedford Light
New Bedford has a severe housing shortage that has driven up prices beyond what many residents can afford. One recent report estimated the city needs 4,100 more units to meet current demand. Latham and her team see their vacant property work as one more way the city can put more homes back on the market.
The number of properties on the city’s vacant building registry has fallen from 399 to 215 since Latham joined the city in late 2023. The tally includes apartment buildings. So the total number of empty housing units reflected on the registry has declined to about 300 as of December 2024 — down from 570 in September 2023.
Latham said local developers want these properties. “They’ll take it if there’s a missing roof,” she said.
She meant that literally. On their tour with a Light reporter, officials pointed out a roofless property that a developer was looking to buy.
“The reality is, a lot of these are blocked by certain circumstances, and if they’re unblocked, the private market can deal with it,” Amaral said.
Even the most distressed properties can be worth a lot of money, Latham said. She and Amaral said heirs to properties that are severely behind on taxes could still walk away with $10,000 or $20,000 in remaining equity.
Why don’t they?
Latham said the most common problem she runs into is that the owner died with no will. That means the estate has to go through probate court, a complicated and expensive process that sometimes can’t be done without a lawyer. Title issues and other confusing claims on properties can add even more friction.
Dozens of bank-owned properties are also languishing around the city simply because the banks haven’t gotten around to selling them, Latham said.
About half of the city’s vacant properties that aren’t actively under construction are behind on property taxes, officials said. Their total tax bill adds up to $2,767,559.
The longer properties sit empty, the harder they are to rehabilitate, housing officials said. Late taxes and code violations can quickly eat up the property’s equity. The structure deteriorates, further cutting into its value and increasing renovation costs. Squatters can get in. Neighbors have to live near an ugly and potentially unsafe house.
Latham’s approach
One reason the city’s list of vacant buildings has been shrinking is that the private market has acted without the city’s intervention, housing officials said. Rising property values and soaring housing demand have made it easier for developers to pull off renovations that would have been too expensive a few years ago, officials said.
Vacant Property Development Manager Jordan Latham uses software that merges data from across city departments to help her identify potentially vacant properties. Credit: Grace Ferguson / The New Bedford Light
Latham said about 50 buildings that received some intervention from the city have come back onto the market, or will be listed soon. About 60 additional buildings are actively being rehabilitated, she said.
She monitors properties using city software that merges data from various city departments. That’s a change from the city’s past approach to managing vacant properties, which relied on neighbor complaints.
If a property’s water meter hasn’t shown any flow in months, or if it’s racking up code violations and tax liens, those are signs a property could be vacant. She said she also keeps an eye on death notices so she can jump in if the heirs run into trouble with the estate.
Latham coordinates with 15 different city departments in monthly meetings of the city’s Vacant Property Working Group. They flag empty properties they come across while enforcing other city codes, and they coordinate on how to respond together.
If a property’s water meter hasn’t shown any flow in months, or if it’s racking up code violations and tax liens, those are signs a property could be vacant. Credit: Grace Ferguson / The New Bedford Light
Most cities deal with vacant properties by slapping them with escalating fines and filing lawsuits to take control of them. New Bedford isn’t abandoning those approaches, but Latham’s work adds a strategy that doesn’t punish owners who need help.
“It’s just being that liaison for these individuals with a very intimidating process,” Latham said.
People call Latham with all kinds of problems. One elderly woman didn’t know what to do after her brother, a hoarder, died and left behind a house stuffed with belongings, so Latham researched local junk removal companies. A family working on a renovation project was afraid to be scammed by phony contractors, so Latham gave them a list of professionals the city had vetted.
Latham’s work on each property usually starts with an official letter informing the owner or heirs that they need to register the property as vacant. She follows up with a friendlier letter to introduce herself and offer help, with her number at the bottom. She resorts to cold calling if neither of those work, but she said she gets frequent responses to the letters alone.
“Sometimes people call and they’ll be saying, ‘Thank you for this letter; this is maybe the kick in the pants we needed,’” she said.
Housing officials pointed out success stories as they toured the city with a Light reporter this month. One property with a long-deceased owner was more than $100,000 behind in taxes, but Latham has helped the owner’s heirs in North Carolina make a plan to get the property through probate court.
“This one, we have worked very closely with the family,” Latham said as they pulled up to a boarded-up, pale green house in the South End.
The heirs of this home were in Portugal, she said, and the trust that owned the property had no trustee. Latham put the heirs in touch with a local probate lawyer who helped them sort out the estate. The home was condemned and had squatters at one point, but now, it’s about to be sold to a developer, she said.
In the West End, another empty property is about to be sold after Latham got in touch with an heir in Virginia. He overcame the complexities of a reverse mortgage and missing trust documents with the help of a probate lawyer, she said.
Another challenge was, literally, around the corner.
“This gentleman’s heirs are in Tanzania,” Latham said, pointing out a brick house. “How am I gonna find them?”
Probate problems
Latham said she has learned more about probate than she ever thought she would.
“It can be a very daunting process, even if there is a will,” Latham said. “It is easily the biggest hurdle we have found.”
While it’s possible for a regular person to probate an estate on their own, many families need a lawyer to help them navigate more complex cases. That can cost about $5,000 to $10,000 upfront, with the rest of the legal fees coming out of the estate.
“People then just stall,” Latham said. “They’re like, ‘This is gonna stink, this is too much.’”
Sentimental value plays a role, too. Some heirs don’t want to sell their family property, but they have no other way of paying a lawyer to guide them through probate. Others insist that they want to fix a dilapidated home to “keep it in the family,” but they aren’t prepared for such a major renovation project.
New Bedford needs more lawyers willing to write wills and file probate cases pro-bono for less affluent families, Latham said. She has reached out to the UMass Law School to see if it can help.
Vacant Property Development Manager Jordan Latham tracked down heirs in North Carolina for this long-vacant property. Credit: Grace Ferguson / The New Bedford Light
It’s more important to get properties through probate now than it was a few years ago, Amaral said. That’s because Massachusetts recently updated its tax foreclosure laws in ways that protect homeowners’ equity but make the process harder, longer, and more expensive for cities.
Housing office staff said some heirs have told them they were just waiting for the city to foreclose on the property and sell it — something the city is now loath to do because of the time and expense.
It’s not just probate that holds properties back. Other confusing legal barriers get in the way of heirs taking responsibility for a property, Latham said.
Heirs often feel like there’s nothing they can do if their family’s home has a reverse mortgage, so they wait for the bank to act, she said. But she has found that there are ways the heirs can keep the property, or sell it and potentially walk away with some equity.
She has found similar problems with claims on properties by MassHealth, the state-sponsored health insurance program. The agency seeks to recoup costs from long-term care by putting a lien on the patient’s property, which it can then foreclose on after the patient dies.
These liens tend to be worth more than the entire cost of a property, housing officials said — in one case, they found a MassHealth lien worth $1 million. But the agency doesn’t always foreclose on the lien quickly. Heirs have no incentive to move the process along because they know they won’t get any equity in the end.
Housing officials said they had a “very productive” call with MassHealth’s estate recovery team this month, and they plan to keep working together.
Helping neighbors
Msatfi, who lived next to the squatter house, told housing officials she had moved in just a month and a half ago. It was the first home she had ever owned, and now she was afraid to let her children play outside in her new yard. She started to tear up.
Ashley Eaton, the city’s neighborhood planner, gave her a hug. She, Amaral, and Latham all promised Msatfi they were doing everything they could to hold the bank accountable.
Latham held her hand and said she was a mom, too.
“It will be OK. Just keep calling the police,” she said. “We will address this.”
Email Grace Ferguson at [email protected]
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