Pain of Foreclosures Spreads to the Affluent

This wooded town of roughly 60,000 on Long Island Sound — home to dozens of hedge funds, many millionaires and more than a few billionaires — is one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country. But even Greenwich, Connecticut is not immune to the wave of home foreclosures sweeping the nation.

On Stanwich Road, for example, a house worth $2.6 million is close to going on the block. On Hettiefred Road, the owner of a 2,720-square-foot, four-bedroom colonial featuring a luxury kitchen, swimming pool and tennis court, has been threatened with foreclosure for months. Several dozen other owners in Greenwich have received foreclosure notices this year.

But there is a difference from most other communities. Auctioning off such homes is a far greater challenge here than elsewhere, as affluent but cash-squeezed owners often find ways to delay losing their homes, sometimes by coming up with just enough to make last-minute payments avoiding a final sale — for a while, anyway.

Just ask John Thygerson, who parked his Jeep sport utility vehicle in front of the empty house on Hettiefred Road on the flawless spring day last Saturday.

As a foreclosure auctioneer, he was scheduled — for the third time since January — to sell the house. But the owner, a construction business owner who has fallen on hard times, made a last-minute mortgage payment and the foreclosure was postponed yet again.

David Zalubowski / AP

So Mr. Thygerson was there to shoo prospective buyers off the property, nod at inquisitive neighbors and stake out a new spot for a fourth set of foreclosure signs after the first three had been mysteriously torn down.

“We never had a case that had gone through three separate sales attempts,” he said, still dazed that the auction failed to take place. “Greenwich being Greenwich, foreclosures are a rare occurrence.”

Rare, perhaps, but not unheard-of, as the housing industry collapse starts to claim victims among the affluent. Personal traumas like business reversal, illness and divorce play a role. There’s no real pattern, with people as diverse as builders, restaurateurs and poker players at risk of losing their homes.

The town, which typically has about half a dozen foreclosure notices each month, recorded 34 filings in January, according to RealtyTrac.

But even the most financially stressed of Greenwich homeowners have generally been able to ward off actually losing their homes.

RealtyTrac data shows that owners of seven homes received notices of default last month, and another home is about to be auctioned in this town where the average single family home that sold this year went for $3.1 million. The owners of all of them had received notices of pending litigation but were still hoping to rescue their positions. In the last 30 days, none of the three Greenwich properties listed for auction were actually sold.

As millions across the nation face the threat of losing their homes, the few Greenwich owners in trouble are tapping into other resources that most people cannot call upon to help prevent the ultimate indignity.

In Greenwich, foreclosure filings were made against 100 homes last year, according to RealtyTrac. That translates into less than half of 1 percent of Greenwich’s 24,511 households, compared with a rate higher than 1 percent nationwide.

Already one of the richest cities in the country in 2000, when the Census Bureau recorded a median household income of $99,086 — more than double the national average — the town has become far wealthier in recent years, with the exponential growth of many of the hedge funds that have set up business here. A new generation of wealthy Wall Street executives has moved in as well. By 2007, the Connecticut Economic Resources Center reported, the median household income had risen to $122,849, with many homeowners earning far more.

The tearing down of existing homes to make room for new ones has continued despite the mortgage crisis that began last summer. And while prices and sales volume are dropping, Greenwich is not suffering as badly as nearby towns.