“We have Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Chase openly admitting to what they’re trying to say are irregularities — but are actually fraud upon the courts,” said Lisa Epstein, a housing activist who regularly attends foreclosure hearings in South Florida. “Our court system responds by ramping this up and pushing [cases] through.”

In September, banks began halting their foreclosure operations to review hundreds of thousands of legal documents for errors and inconsistencies. Most lenders restarted their foreclosures shortly after the moratorium, but banks continue to face allegations of fraud from local defense lawyers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

ONLINE AUCTIONS

After distressed homes slog their way through foreclosure court, they usually land at the office of the county clerk, who handles the public auction process.

As foreclosures skyrocketed, that process became clogged by the sheer volume of cases coming in — 7,000 per month in Miami-Dade alone in early 2010. Boxes of old case files piled up at the county clerk’s offices, and cases spent months waiting to go to auction at the county courthouse.

With more than 110,000 pending auctions and a closeout rate of about 400 auctions per week, the crisis outgrew the capability of the courthouse, said Miami-Dade County Clerk Harvey Ruvin.

Last January, Miami-Dade and Broward counties moved their auction system from the courthouse to the Internet, more than quadrupling the number of cases they could handle per week.

“Going online with the foreclosures was an important piece in terms of helping to move things through the process so that we could help globalize the distressed market in South Florida,” Ruvin said.

The backlog has been cut nearly in half, Ruvin said, but it still remains far above traditional levels.

HOMEOWNERS

In the meantime, the length of time it took for banks to close a foreclosure case has grown steadily to its current average of 16 months nationwide and 20 months in Florida, according to Lender Processing Services.

In South Florida, where nearly half of all homeowners owe more on their homes than they are worth, 20 months of rent-free living adds an incentive for borrowers to voluntarily stop paying their mortgages.

The impact is felt by non-distressed homeowners as well, since growing numbers of foreclosures in the neighborhood drag down home values. Sellers of non-distressed homes found that buyers preferred to buy foreclosures or homes worth less than their mortgage amounts in 2010, when about 50 percent of South Florida sales involved distressed properties. To compete, sellers have had to slash prices significantly, steepening South Florida’s historic decline in home values.

OTHERS

The housing collapse pulled the rug from under a number of other organizations, and many of them are only now beginning to regain their footing.

Declines in home values sparked a record-setting spike in property tax appeals for county value adjustment boards. Homeowners filed more than 140,000 property assessment appeals in Miami-Dade County and another 34,000 in Broward for the 2009 tax year. Huge backlogs piled up for the value adjustment boards, and the average wait time for a homeowner to get an appeal hearing has grown to about two years in Miami-Dade. Last year’s appeals likely won’t be heard until late this year, county officials said. Before the housing boom and crash, value adjustment boards were staffed for only a modest number of appeals — petitions averaged less than 20,000 per year between 2001 and 2005.