24-Story Pile Of F'closure Papers Threatens To Topple Miami Courthouse??? "We Have 125,000 Open Files!!!" Says Clerk Of Court As He Sends Out SOS

Over on West Flagler Street in beautiful downtown Miami, Florida, Miami New Times reports:

• There was a time — say, last summer — when no clerk wanted to enter a certain room on the 15th floor of 140 W. Flagler St., a drab Miami-Dade County municipal building downtown. Inside lurked a multi-ton beast made of dead trees: the collection of pending foreclosure case files for the county. Since the economy began its nosedive, roughly 8,000 foreclosures have been filed per month, which is about the number the county used to have in a year, according to Clerk of the Courts Harvey Ruvin: "We have 125,000 open files. If you piled all of them on top of each other, it would make a 24-story building."

• "You could hear the floors creaking under all the weight," says a female clerk who asked not to be named. "Everybody was joking about how if one of us fell through that floor, it would be the lawsuit of the century."

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• Nonetheless, last July, the clerk's employees began moving the files the half-block to a scavenged judge's quarters on the seventh floor of 73 W. Flagler St., a task they didn't complete until February. But the insatiable monster has continued to grow, and Shabazz says of the new file room: "It's getting unruly in there." "It's going to blow," says an older female clerk, who, like her colleague, requested anonymity. "You go in there? Do a Hail Mary first."(1)

For the story, see A pile of foreclosure papers threatens to topple a downtown Miami courthouse.

See also, "It's Going to Blow!": Miami-Dade's Leaning Tower of Debt Haunts Clerks' Dreams.

(1) Go here to view the foreclosure file room that the clerks are deathly afraid of entering.