For years, Barbara Small fought to hold onto her house in Flatbush, Brooklyn, after it fell into foreclosure. On the day it finally went up for auction, she sobbed on the train ride to the Supreme Court building in Downtown Brooklyn. The outcome would mean forfeiting her nest egg. She wasn’t required to attend the sale but she was determined to show up anyway.
She had purchased the narrow, three-story brick home on Linden Boulevard in 2005 with her father, a former transit worker who’d emigrated from Barbados via London in the 1970s. The house was a place for him to live out his retirement as well as an investment for Small and her children once she retired from the U.S. Postal Service.
Fourteen years later, her father was dead and she had lost the property after a series of financial setbacks, including a tenant who stopped paying rent. In her case, the mortgage was owned by a group of investors and managed by the Bank of New York Mellon and a loan servicer named Shellpoint…