Battling the Decay of Foreclosures By ROBIN FINN
Published: July 17, 2009
THE homes on either side of the decrepit structure at 716 Narragansett Avenue in East Patchogue, N.Y., are delineated by orderly chain-link fences. Their lawns are shorn, their flower beds painstakingly mulched. A parakeet twitters beneath twin sun umbrellas on the rear deck at one home, No. 722. With curtains fluttering in the windows and shiny S.U.V.’s hunkered in the driveways, the two residences are a model of working-class suburbia in repose.
But the decaying ’60s colonial-style house sandwiched between those two prim residences is a dead zone, one of a hundred vacant houses in the Long Island town that are widely believed to have caught the subprime mortgage contagion. Its front yard is a tangle of weeds and buckled concrete walkways, its backyard an illegal dumping ground for opportunistic contractors. In one of the broken second-floor bedroom windows, a child’s Scooby-Doo sheet, an incongruous remnant of happier times, is substituting as a window shade. No one would want to call this place home; no one does.
“It’s no good,” said Yanira Amaya, the frazzled neighbor at tidy No. 722, about living next door to an abandoned eyesore. Hers is not an isolated problem. Travel a few streets east to Meade Avenue in North Bellport, and the desolation is magnified. In the space of a city block, four tiny ranch-style houses sit boarded up and vacant, all presumably victims of foreclosure or its frequent harbinger, the negligence of an owner or investor.
Foreclosure is an individual and family loss, and a host of groups are addressing that aspect of the problem. But in many Long Island towns, as well as other locations like Orange, N.J., New Haven, Yonkers and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City, homeowners and local groups are also battling the wider effect of foreclosures — the disarray and devaluation of their neighborhoods. ........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/nyregion/19foreclose.html?ref=nyregion
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