Access to Justice in America: A True Story
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Sharon Ellis contacted the East St. Louis, Illinois office of Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation, Inc. in February 1995 because the city was refusing to pick up her garbage. She was buying her house on a contract for deed, and she was paying into escrow for taxes, insurance and garbage pick-up. When she contacted the city, she was told that they wouldn’t pick up her garbage because the real estate management company hadn’t paid their bill to the city.
The next week, Ms. Ellis got a notice from the management company stating that she was behind in her payments and that her taxes had not been paid because of her delinquency. According to her records, she was current in her payments, but the company refused to provide a record of her payments or the balance due. She had bought her house several years earlier from a local real estate investor. He had sold her contract to out of state investors, and she didn’t know how to reach them. Her only local contact was an intimidating man who collected her payments.
For attorneys at Land of Lincoln, Ms. Ellis’ complaints were all too familiar. In the summer of 1994, they had started to hear the same complaints from a number of clients. In July and August 1994, David Migoya, an investigative reporter for the local alternative paper, “The Riverfront Times”, ran articles about out of state investors bilking local home buyers. Attorneys from Land of Lincoln met with Mr. Migoya and reviewed the results of his research. It appeared that low-income homebuyers in the East St. Louis area were the victims of a vast multi-state insurance scam.
Diane Thompson, a recent graduate of New York University School of Law and a new lawyer at Land of Lincoln, had received a Skadden Arps fellowship to do outreach on contract for deed problems and hopefully to enforce an ordinance that was under consideration by the City to prevent contract for deed abuses. At every outreach session she conducted, most of the residents who stayed afterwards to talk to her were buying property involved in the scam. During the fall and winter of 1994, the number of clients contacting Land of Lincoln continued to grow, and the lawyers worked to piece together the complex facts and develop litigation to prevent hundreds of local residents from losing their homes.
Five years later, in February 2000, Sharon Ellis owns her home and is treasurer of a local housing development organization called Citizens for the Future that conveyed title to her when she made her last payment. Ms. Ellis’ situation in 1995 has been described as a nightmare. But, because Ms. Ellis and other brave residents had access to free civil legal assistance, their dreams of owning their homes are being realized. This is their story about access to justice.