Foreclosures Hit Far Beyond Dorchester's Hendry Street

Boston Mayor Tom Menino led city officials to Dorchester's Hendry Street, which has been hit hard by foreclosures and property abandonment. (Photo: PETE STIDMAN for dotnews.com)

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The following article was first published in the Dorchester Reporter newspaper.

Months after coverage in the Dorchester Reporter last September, and mere days after wider publicity in the Boston Herald, Mayor Thomas Menino swooped down on troubled Hendry Street on Meeting House Hill last Thursday [Feb. 21, 2008, after the Reporter's production deadline] with most of his cabinet and a squadron of city workers.

"The only thing that's going [to] help the neighborhood is to get all the houses [that are] vacant and get the occupancies here," said one resident, watching the maelstrom of street-cleaning, graffiti-busting and signpost-straightening from her porch.

Hendry has garnered attention for both the concentration of foreclosed properties on the tiny side street, and for the dramatic pictures rows of boarded-up houses.

But most foreclosed properties in Dorchester - and there are hundreds of them - are not boarded up. If they were, the growing problem would be much more apparent.

In 2006, there were 261 foreclosures in the city of Boston. In 2007, there were 233 in Dorchester alone, nearly doubling Roxbury's totals.

In the city overall, there were 703 last year, according to the Suffolk Registry of Deeds.

One pedestrian ambling down Ridgewood Street several blocks away from the city's "ground zero" at Hendry Street knew all about the crisis there, but was surprised to hear there were several foreclosures on the street he was visiting a friend on. "Really?" he asked.

The small neighborhood there - spanning Ridgewood, Westville, Leroy and Josephine streets - represents another slightly-less concentrated, much less visible, but equally-worrying hot spot in the ongoing foreclosure crisis.

On Ridgewood, only one block long, six houses have been foreclosed upon and stand vacant, others are in the early stages of foreclosure, but only one house on the street is boarded up.

In a cursory look at the three other city blocks adjacent to Ridgewood, the Reporter identified 11 other foreclosed, empty houses, but there are undoubtedly more.

Also illusory to the passerby is the presence of brand new housing. Viet-AID and Dorchester Bay EDC just finished a joint project building 20 new units of scattered housing in the neighborhood in November, but as many as 12 of them have yet to sell.

"The biggest problem is we want to go back to the city and ask that they lower the prices," said Viet-AID director Hiep Chu. Some of the houses are priced at market rates, he said, and face steep competition from other housing stock in an increasingly buyer-friendly market.

Other concentrations of empty foreclosed houses are popping up off of Blue Hill Avenue, Woodrow Avenue, Columbia Road and Bowdoin Street, and there are many more foreclosures yet to come, according to those who study the problem.

"If you look at subprime loans and mortgage rate reset dates, you can see we're not through the cycle yet," said Bill Cotter, who tracks foreclosures for the city's Department of Neighborhood Development. "Our data shows that more than 70% of the subprime adjustable rate loans are foreclosed on even before the loan resets and the payment increases."

Cotter, Menino and other municipal leaders are clamoring for federal assistance to help save afflicted neighborhoods. The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing earlier this month on the mortgage lending industry, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors has submitted the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 to the Senate, but some lawmakers debate whether regulation is necessary.

Attorney General Martha Coakley added some strength to Massachusetts' own regulations in October last year [2007], requiring mortgage brokers to be fair in assessing what borrowers can afford to pay back. Those rules are now in effect, and an increased awareness of subprime lending may be adding to their ability to stem unfair lending practices.

Nevertheless, subprime lenders that have survived are struggling to keep their doors open to borrowers or reopen them after losing hundreds of millions as the foreclosure crisis deepened.

An example is Accredited Home Lenders Inc., which held a place at the forefront of the subprime lending market nationwide until closing their office to new loans after losing hundreds of millions of dollars and laying off 1,600 workers in late 2007.

The company foreclosed on 19-21 Hendry St. last year, as well as 11 Leroy St., 177 Westville and 216 Westville.

The company continues to foreclose on properties across Dorchester, including three so far this month, often only a year or two after granting the original mortgage. The pattern is common to dozens of other subprime lenders.

After a recent $295 million buyout from Lone Star Funds, Accredited was once again lending to high-risk clients earlier this year, according to Reuters news service. But a 2008 mortgage from the company has yet to be recorded with the Suffolk Registry of Deeds, which includes Boston.

The question of how to hold banks and mortgage lenders responsible for properties after foreclosure is still one city officials are trying to answer.

If the properties are tax delinquent, the city can pursue a long process to foreclose on them. Five properties in the Hendry Street area have tax title takings filed on them, the first step.

Numerous others in the rest of the neighborhood do also, many delivered to doorsteps earlier this month. Menino promised to move quickly on all tax delinquent properties at last Thursday's press conference on Hendry.

Councillor Rob Consalvo from Hyde Park filed an ordinance last month that would require mortgage lenders to notify the city before foreclosing on a property, and require them to maintain it or incur a $300 a week fine.

"What I want to do is hold owners responsible for the condition of their properties, making sure their property is not a blight on the community," Consalvo said. "We don't want to go back to the days when there were hundreds of these unattended to properties all over the city."

But outside of those solutions, there is little the city can do legally, according to the city's Corporation Counsel William Sinnott, though it will try.

"At the mayor's directive, we have been examining properties since the early fall," he said. "A number of city agencies are actually looking at how to deal with problem properties and part of that is communication between departments. We're looking at all our options, there's no uniform approach."

source: DotNews.com

SEE ALSO THESE ARTICLES in New England Ethnic News:

"Subprime Lenders Have Racial Bias, Costing $164-$213 Billion in Lost Homes," Jan. 21, 2008

"Subprime Mortgage Crisis Could Destroy Urban Communities," Jan. 23, 2008

"Foreclosure Crisis Lets Minority-owned Banks Help Community," Nov. 22, 2007

"Tackling Foreclosures in Lawrence, Mass., Through Latina Leader Ana Luna," Nov. 12, 2007

Copyright 2008 New England Ethnic News, EthnicNewz.org. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express permission of the source. Contact Newz for more information.

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