Some community-development organizations think the foreclosure crisis is over, but there’s a new emergency now hitting the elderly hard, says Lou Tisler, who recently left Neighborhood Housing Services of Greater Cleveland after 12 years as executive director. That new crisis is tax foreclosures — the sale of a property due to unpaid tax liabilities.

My mother’s brush with death started out innocuously. She had a persistent “wheezing,” and while—as the days passed by and it turned into a cough—she knew it probably should have gone away by that time, it took too much energy to catch the required two buses to visit her physician. It could wait a little longer, she reasoned.