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Chicago sheriff ends foreclosure evictions.

Law enforcement officers in Chicago will no longer evict residents from foreclosed properties, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart of Cook County announced Wednesday.

The department was on pace to conduct 4,700 foreclosures this year, nearly triple the number from two years ago, Sheriff Dart said.

Housing advocates said that they thought the measure was the first of its kind, but that in recent years, several sheriffs and judges around the country had taken other steps to slow foreclosure proceedings, like requiring lenders to produce titles proving they owned the properties in question. In Philadelphia this year, Sheriff John D. Green temporarily suspended sales of foreclosed properties.

Sheriff Dart said he took the measure because an increasing number of the residents being evicted were renters who might have been dutifully paying their rent, and might have had no knowledge that the owner was behind on the mortgage.

Under a new Chicago law, renters are entitled to a 90-day grace period, starting at the time a foreclosure sale is confirmed, before they can be evicted.

Sheriff Dart said the families in foreclosed properties were often not notified that they would have to leave, and were not given this grace period. Sometimes their first sign of trouble was the appearance of deputies at the door, demanding that they leave.

“It started with just a couple cases like that, but they kept multiplying,” Sheriff Dart said. “Just in the past month, about a third of the people we were asked to evict were under very questionable circumstances. It got to the point that enough was enough.”