The real victims of the West Grove mortgage fraud scams...

Seems like it was just yesterday that we uncovered millions of dollars worth of mortgage fraud scams in the West Grove section of Coconut Grove.  The truth is that was nearly four years ago, yesterday I accidentally found myself driving through that very same area again so I decided to pass by some of the homes that I had written about back then to see what they looked like today.  I figured by now, several years later, that the homes would have gone through the foreclosure process and would have been purchased by new buyers who would have rehabbed them and resold them, I was shocked at what I saw.  Let's start with 3379 Oak Avenue, the home that sold for $616.00/sqft back in December of 2008, here is what it looked like during the summer of 2009...

How does this humble little home look like today?  Here we go...

How do you like that?  The home is condemned, garbage all over the place, landscaping overgrown, etc.  Now lets take a look right next door at 3375 Oak Avenue, this home sold for $425/sqft back in September 2008, here's how it looked back then...

And here it is today...

Once again, in state of disrepair, condemned, garbage all over the place, etc.


Last but not least, lets take a look at 3390 Oak Avenue, the home that was at the center of the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case, a home that sold for over $600,000 back in February 2008.  This is what it looked like in July of 2009 when we first wrote about it...

And here it is four years after the fraudulent sale...

Still in a state of disrepair, condemned, etc, etc.  So who are the real victims of these frauds?  Certainly not the banks that lent the money to the straw buyers and the recruiters who put these deals together, the real victims here are the poor neighborhoods where these homes are located.  Here we are over four years since the frauds occurred and these homes are still sitting there empty, bringing down the neighborhood, screwing up home values and giving undesirables a place to hang out and do their nefarious deeds.  The other thing to consider is that these frauds displaced the multi-generational West Grove families of Bahamian descent, families that did not benefit at all from these inflated sales prices, families that were part of the original Coconut Grove fabric, who knows where they've ended up now.


Now here's an even worse thought.  Could there be some sort of conspiracy occurring over hear in West Grove?  Could there be some reason why these homes have been allowed to sit dormant like this all these years?  The first consequence of these "zombies" littering this neighborhood is decreased property values throughout the West Grove, this plays perfectly into the plans of speculators who are looking to gentrify the neighborhood.  Think about it, they can sweep up the remaining properties for a song and dance then go ahead and start rebuilding the neighborhood when they own the majority of the homes therefore scoring a massive windfall and also running out the last of the original West Grove residents.  Sounds evil, doesn't it?  Otherwise, how can you explain what's going on?