Tomeka Langford legitimately felt invisible as her house was swiftly snatched from her. Then it was given away to a white woman.
The narrative was told via The Guardian by a writer who claimed to be the buyer of Langford’s house.
The narrative of Langford is straight out of a horror film. According to reports, she paid $700 for a house in Banglatown back in 2010. She had been regularly renting places in the past, but she wanted to exchange in her monthly rent for a mortgage.
She was fortunate since houses were going for incredibly inexpensive prices. Some had price tags of $5,000, $2,000, $500, and even $1.
Homes with prices this cheap frequently came with the burden of managing numerous repairs and hefty property tax bills. As Langford’s seller, William C. Murray II, kept her informed about repairs and back taxes, she was fully aware of what she was getting herself into.
Both were estimated to be at least $10,000 in price. Langford, however, asserts that she had the resources to fund the maintenance.
Between 2010 and 2011, she started the process and spent a reported $6,000 or $7,000.
Langford’s home-buying experience appeared to be fleeting after that point. A robbery, time away from the house, and then discovering their home had unintentionally been put on the Wayne county tax foreclosure auction website overshadowed what should have been happy occasions.
“This is really for sale! They done clinked it out,” Langford recalled about the moment.
By this point, Langford acknowledges that she did experience some difficulties with making monthly house payments. But Langford maintains she never got a letter at her new address or a personal invitation to drop off her property tax payments for the impending foreclosure.
By 2015, Write A House had purchased Langford’s house for $5,000. Anne Elizabeth Moore received the same house as a complimentary gift intended to help writers.
Before listing her house for sale two years later, Moore was unaware that it was in Langford’s name.
“After a two-year period, the house was supposed to go in my name. The deed did – the document that gives me the right to own the property. But this is different from a title, as mortgage companies will describe it, because a deed is a document while a title is a legal framework, a set of conditions that confer uncontestable ownership of a property. The title didn’t change hands,” Moore wrote, according to reports. “I discovered this when I put the house on the market, two and a half years after I had moved into it. That was when my title agency informed me that the title to the house was still in Tomeka Langford’s name.”
Langford allegedly first learned her home was given to Moore after opening a document that demonstrated she was being sued for ownership when Moore was seeking to secure the title for the home.
“It’s almost like a death,” Langford said, according to The Guardian. “You don’t never forget it, but you learn to move on.”
Moore offers more information as evidence of how their disagreement about who should own the house. According to court records from Wayne county, Langford only made one payment totaling $689 and still owing more than $5,000 in taxes. That amount was decreased to $4,449.00 even after foreclosure. Langford is convinced that she reduced her debt by $1,500 or $2,000 though.
“I would make multiple payments, like when I’d get my tax [refund], I’d go drop off a lump sum,” Langford explained, according to The Guardian. “Then in between I only had to pay off a hundred dollars, or a hundred and something dollars per month.”
Despite her payments, Stephanie Davis, communications manager in the office of the chief financial officer, city of Detroit, provided further context on how her home was still taken.
“When the 2009 taxes went unpaid for a third year, the ‘Judgment of Foreclosure’ was issued by the Wayne County Treasurer for this property. This happens often when someone purchases a home without checking first to see if the prior owner had unpaid taxes, which the new owner becomes responsible for,” said Davis, according to The Guardian.
Since the incident, Moore and Langford have crossed paths, and the tale reveals that Moore had no intention of assuming control of a residence already owned by a local Detroiter. Langford, meanwhile, is still mourning the possibility of what might have been.
When you consider that Langford was almost certainly paying significantly more than the home’s assessment rate, her predicament only got worse. She is unlikely to pursue a lawsuit, though, as she isn’t sure that she has enough evidence to make a compelling argument for herself.