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From Todays Herald:
The Boston Herald said:Foreclosure ground zero
Dorchester?s Hendry Street center of Hub?s mortgage crisis
By Laura Crimaldi / Special Report | Sunday, February 10, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage
Photo by Patrick Whittemore
Shock waves from the mortgage foreclosure crisis rocking the global economy are sending tremors through a depressed section of Dorchester that has been turned into a blighted urban ghost town as a result of foreclosures, shady real estate deals and abandonment.
The epicenter is Hendry Street on Meeting House Hill, where a shot at urban renewal in an area historically ravaged by drugs and crime was dashed by a spate of foreclosures that left seven homes boarded up or empty. Those shuttered triple-deckers, including two condemned last year by the city, face the corners of Coleman and Clarkson streets, where six more properties stand boarded up due to abandonment or foreclosure.
?It really is devastating,? said Jeanne DuBois, executive director of the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corp. ?We feel a huge amount of urgency.?
Overall, 33 percent of the city?s 703 foreclosures hit Dorchester last year. Roxbury has the second-highest concentration with 18 percent of the foreclosures in 2007, city records show.
Those shutterings represent the curb-level fallout of a global financial slump many experts say was driven by greed, easy money and inept or corrupt oversight by the mortgage and banking industries.
Activists, police, public officials and urban affairs experts agree that rundown vacant buildings are leading indicators for the violence and dysfunction that can spread like wildfire from one urban zone to the next in a bad economy.
?There was a lot of bad lending, a lot of bad decisions made and we?re now seeing the results,? said Thomas Callahan, executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance.
City and county property records show that the bottom started falling out on Hendry Street in December 2005 when a triple-decker that had been bought for $355,000 three years before with a $10,000 down payment was foreclosed.
Within 21 months, another six properties were facing foreclosure, including three triple-deckers that records show were purchased with 100 percent financing that ranged from $446,500 to $550,000.
?This is obviously a tight geographic neighborhood that has suffered the impacts of lots of bad lending, and not just subprime. There looks like there is investor fraud,? said Bill Cotter, deputy director of homebuyer services at the Department of Neighborhood Development. Cotter said the city has helped a dozen homeowners in that neighborhood avoid the foreclosure proceedings that hit 703 homes in Boston last year. Citywide there are 127 abandoned properties, according to records.
But the blight is spreading in a neighborhood repeatedly victimized by housing freefalls. In August, the city condemned 19-21 Hendry St. after inspectors and police found evidence of squatters, health and safety violations, handguns, drugs, human waste, flammable liquids and debris on the premises during a May inspection.
One of the tenants, Keith Gray, 31, said he lived in a car for five months after the city declared the property unfit for human habitation. On Oct. 31, Victor Figueroa, 32, was shot in the leg and arm outside 21 Hendry St. He survived.
On Nov. 29, a Boston police SWAT team descended on 19 Hendry St. after receiving information that a suspect who shot two teens on Cameron Street might be there. Law enforcement found the house empty, a police report said.
Boston police Superintendent in Chief Robert Dunford said a Safe Street Team and the city?s violence intervention program have been implemented there.
?It does hurt the neighborhood because Bowdoin Street, that whole Bowdoin Street-Geneva Avenue area has worked very hard to stabilize itself and bring it back,? he said. ?It?s kind of a step back and the city is working hard to try to resolve some of the issues.?
For community organizer Lew Finfer the situation harkens to 1974, when hundreds of homes in Meeting House Hill and Fields Corner were lost to demolition or fire in another housing downturn.
?That many subprime loans in one area is a form of redlining,? said Finfer, who still has a poster that activists designed during the 1970s to warn against the dangers of abandoned buildings. ?It?s a self-fulfilling prophecy.?
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1072491