Cheryl and Dante Ortiz were diagnosed with different kinds of cancer in the same week. The couple faced mounting medical bills and had fallen behind on their mortgage. One day after a medical appointment, they rushed from the hospital to sign papers in an attempt to save their home in Southbridge, Massachusetts.
“We had the biopsy, got his neck all taped up and drove straight to Boston to sign the mortgage papers,” Cheryl Ortiz recalled. “The only thing I remember about Oct. 31, 2013, is that I signed papers there and I was on the verge of losing my husband. Don’t ask me about what paper, who was there — I don’t know.”
What the couple signed, they later discovered, was a “shared appreciation” mortgage with a Roxbury-based nonprofit that says it helps distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure. BlueHub Capital bought the Ortizes’ home from the bank and sold it back to the couple. When they refinanced three years later, Cheryl Ortiz says she wished she had read the fine print: the relatively new type of mortgage they signed locked them into paying BlueHub 52% of their equity in the home. She owed the lender $40,000 before she could get a new loan.
At a protest Tuesday outside the Roxbury headquarters of BlueHub, formerly Boston Community Capital, Cheryl Ortiz and a few dozen other homeowners rallied against its lending practices. Cheryl, her husband and 17 others describe the nonprofit’s practices as “predatory” and “deceptive” in a lawsuit they filed two years…
