As foreclosures widen, a neighborhood erodes

By Robert Gavin, Globe Staff | October 7, 2007

LAWRENCE — Mario DeJesus struggled under crushing mortgage payments for two years. Now, about to lose his home to foreclosure, he has no money left to move his family into an apartment.

Altagracia Portorreal sleeps uneasily since teenagers broke into the vacant home next door, abandoned by a neighbor who couldn’t keep up with the mortgage. Bienvenido Chalas is cutting the hours of employees who clean carpets and refinish floors as foreclosures drag down the housing market that supports his business.

DeJesus, Portorreal, and Chalas are three faces of the foreclosure crisis sweeping the north side of Lawrence, a crisis that is uprooting families, destabilizing neighborhoods and shaking a local economy only beginning to recover from the real estate crash of the 1990s, when so many abandoned buildings burned that Lawrence became known as New England’s ‘‘arson capital.’’

‘‘I thought nothing could be as bad as the ’90s,’’ said Mary Marra, executive director of Bread & Roses Housing, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing. ‘‘But I’m beginning to question that.’’

What’s happening here in this poor section of one of the state’s poorest cities shows the consequences of the frenzied, indiscriminate, and sometimes predatory lending that accompanied the recent housing boom. Lawrence’s north side is one of many communities, often poor and minority, that were flooded in the late stages of the boom with subprime mortgages, typically high cost adjustable rate loans for borrowers with credit problems.

Many succumbed to the lure of easy money, and bought homes beyond their modest incomes. Now, pick any street in the 2 miles between DeJesus’s and Portorreal’s homes, and chances are you’ll find homeowners in foreclosure, or desperately trying to sell before it’s too late.

At Ebenezer Christian Church, Pastor Victor Jarvis said, church members approach him and whisper, ‘‘I’m losing my house. Please pray for me so I’m able to sell it.’’

Caught in downward spiral

Lawrence’s north side stretches between two hills, Tower, to the west, and Prospect, to the east. It descends from either side to the Spicket River, becoming poorer and more crowded as it loses elevation. For generations, Lawrence’s immigrant workers climbed the socioeconomic ladder by moving up these hills.

The section, the 01841 zip code, encompasses 3 square miles of tightly packed two- and three-family homes. One in four people live in poverty in the section, and median family income, just under $30,000 a year, is half the state’s. Over less than two years, according to The Warren Group, a Boston real estate data firm, lenders launched nearly 600 foreclosures, roughly one for every 10 owner-occupied homes in the neighborhood. Dozens of buildings, some with boarded doors and windows, stand vacant.

The impact is felt beyond distressed homeowners and their families. Many of these properties are two- and three-family homes with tenants who often must move once the owner loses the building to foreclosure.Each week at housing court in Lawrence, at least two or three cases involve tenants being evicted by lenders, who, after completing a foreclosure, don’t want to act as landlords, according to Neighborhood Legal Services, which provides legal advice at the court sessions. Among them: Antonio Damiron, his wife, Santa Guerrero, and their 2-year-old son, Michael.

‘‘My head is spinning,’’ said Damiron, 45, who is being evicted from the two-bedroom apartment on Trenton Street where his family has lived for about two years. ‘‘Where am I going to go with a wife and kid? I could end up in a shelter. It’s just unreal.’’

At the Lawrence Housing Authority, requests for housing are up by at least 10 percent because of foreclosures, said Deputy Director Efrain Rolon. Once a day, on average, someone comes in and tells employees: ‘‘The bank is taking my house. I can’t refinance. I can’t sell. I need housing.’’

There is little Rolon can do. Waiting lists are so long that they are closed to new applicants. Emergency assistance is possible, he explained, but not until people are actually homeless. ‘‘Who wants to hear that?’’ Rolon said.

Ana Luna is executive director of Arlington Community Trabajando, a north Lawrence neighborhood group. She shook her head as she recently drove past empty homes, slapped with tags that indicate lenders, unable to sell foreclosed properties, have sealed them up and shut off utilities. ‘‘Winterized,’’ the tags say.