Fighting Foreclosures

Each year, the city of Boston sends a small team of workers out into neighborhoods where they go door to door, visually inspecting residences to compile a census of homes that appear abandoned. Last fall, when these abandonment surveys were tallied up, the city noticed a particular trouble spot: Hendry Street in Dorchester, which contained a long row of homes whose owners had fallen victim to the foreclosure crisis.

Nobody likes having a foreclosed home in the neighborhood. But having multiple abandoned buildings in such close proximity—particularly in a part of Boston known for crime and drugs—is especially bad news. It's a problem that's affecting many big cities across the country, and one more way in which the subprime mess isn't just an accounting abstraction but a growing social problem. By last fall, police were getting dozens of calls about crimes on Hendry Street. In early February, Boston Herald reporter Laura Crimaldi wrote a prominent story about the neighborhood, calling it "a blighted urban ghost town," with 13 abandoned homes clustered around a single block.

Four days after the Herald story appeared, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and a small army of city workers showed up for a visit. "This is a cancer that we have in our city that's taking over a neighborhood," Menino said at a curbside press conference. "We will not tolerate this." In the days that followed, city workers boarded up the abandoned properties. They power-washed gang graffiti off the buildings. They swept clean the trash-filled lots. They towed abandoned cars.

Back at City Hall, the mayor convened his newly established "Foreclosure Intervention Team" in a windowless basement "war room," where walls were lined with maps highlighting foreclosed properties in all of the city's neighborhoods. Housing experts, police and social workers compared notes. For properties that were already foreclosed, staffers called loan servicers and tried to work deals so the homes might someday be reoccupied. For homeowners who are behind on their mortgages but aren't yet foreclosed, workers educated them about the array of city programs that might help, including foreclosure counseling, free legal services or referral to a city-approved refinancing company.

Walking down Hendry Street this week, Patricia Canavan, chief housing adviser to Boston's mayor, and Shiela Dillon, deputy director for housing at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, point to some progress they've made in the weeks since Menino's motorcade swept in. The abandoned buildings are secured, with plywood covering every opening. There's a new concrete barrier blocking access to a parking lot behind some buildings, which area residents say had turned into a chop shop for car thieves. And during NEWSWEEK's visit, street cleaners and transit police cruised the area repeatedly.

For many of the houses on this block, the mayor's aides know the full story of what led to the foreclosure. One home, they said, was inhabited by a mentally ill man who inherited the property from his mother but couldn't care for it. After the bank seized it, he began living on the back porch, with his clothes and belongings strewn around the yard. Another woman owned her triple-decker free and clear, but borrowed nearly $300,000 to do some much-needed renovations. Today the outside of the home features new windows and vinyl siding, but the contractor disappeared without completing the interiors, leaving the apartments unrentable and the landlord unable to cover her new mortgage. "[This work] is really retail," Canavan says, describing how they've gone door to door talking to residents about their situations.