Soon-to-be: Home free no more as legal countdown begins

Miami

IN SEPTEMBER, Susan Rodolfi celebrated an unusual anniversary: five years of missed mortgage payments. She is like a ghost of the housing market's painful past, one of thousands of Americans who have skipped years of mortgage payments and are still living in their homes.

Now, a legal quirk could bring a surreal ending to her foreclosure case and many others around the country: They may get to keep their homes without ever having to pay another dime. The reason, lawyers for homeowners argue, is that the cases have dragged on too long.

There are tens of thousands of homeowners who have missed more than five years of mortgage payments, many of them clustered in states like Florida, New Jersey and New York, where lenders must get judges to sign off on foreclosures. However, in a growing number of foreclosure cases filed when home prices collapsed during the financial crisis, lenders may never be able to seize the homes …