With every knock at the door or phone call from a stranger, a shiver runs down the spine of Mindy Wright, housing program director with the Lorain County Urban League.

Wright is one of few certified housing counselors in the county, and it is her job to help those trying to stave off foreclosure. That puts Wright at the center of the growing foreclosure crisis that has devastated families and left cities struggling to find ways to deal with the wave of empty houses dotting their landscape.

STEVE MANHEIM/CHRONICLE

Jose Gordon, 67, of Elyria, packs belongings in her 13th Street home. She likely will lose her home this week.

In the last six years, mortgage lenders and banks have filed 10,267 property foreclosures with the Lorain County Clerk of Courts.

According to data from RealtyTrac, which monitors the housing market, Ohio finished 2007 with the sixth-worst foreclosure rate in the nation. In the state’s 88 counties, there were 153,196 foreclosure filings for the year, and 89,979 properties entered some stage of foreclosure.

Ohio’s foreclosure filings increased 88 percent from 2006 — 1.8 percent of the state’s households entered some stage of foreclosure during the year.

Locally, the numbers have not jumped in the same drastic way, but they continue to rise with each passing year, according to figures from the county clerk’s office.

In 2002, there were 1,360 foreclosure filings. In 2006, that number jumped to 2,188. It rose again in 2007 to 2,256.

Wright has had a frontline view of the devastation wrought by foreclosure, and she wishes her services weren’t needed with such urgency.

In 2007, she counseled 334 clients seeking housing help and made 1,500 to 2,000 referrals to other agencies.

“I know what the foreclosure numbers are better than anyone else because I am literally being bombarded every day with people who need help,” she said. “My phone is ringing nonstop, my e-mail is full, and I’m meeting with people every day. But I knew this day was coming.”

Wright saw the clouds roll in before the storm 4½ years ago while working with the Lorain County Reinvestment Coalition.

Subprime and adjustable rate loans rained down on Lorain County, flooding neighborhoods with new homeowners.

“Even back then, we knew some of those homeowners weren’t going to be able make those balloon payments when those adjustable rates rose. But there was nothing we could do. Banks were pushing them, and people were happy to get them as long as it meant they could buy a house,” Wright said.

However, three years later, the good times ended and homeowners began losing their homes.

“It’s sad, but lenders put a lot of people into loans they knew they couldn’t afford, knowing that when you increase a homeowner’s mortgage by $300 to $600 every six months, not a whole lot of people will be able to afford that for long,” Wright said.

While bad lending has definitely played a role, the economy is not without blame. Inflation, job loss and the possibility that the country is sliding into a recession have many worried about what the future will hold.

“Back two, three or four years ago, we just thought it was a low-income problem. Then, it hit the big guys on Wall Street and now everyone cares. At this point in time, foreclosures are reaching every community, every society and every walk of life,” Wright said. “It’s across the board. I’ve counseled people with incomes of $75,000 and people with very little money where you think, ‘How did they get this loan to begin with?’ It’s not one race or socioeconomic group.”

Wright doesn’t foresee the trend abating as lenders are only willing to work with homeowners so much.

Lenders — thinking they are helping — are resetting adjustable loans with a fixed rate for two years, but readjusting them again after 24 months, setting families up for failure all over again, she said.

“And, it’s not just because someone stupidly got in over their head or got a predatory loan. It’s people who just have one thing happen where they miss that one payment,’’ Wright said. “Once they get behind, everything else spirals out of control and before they know it, the sheriff’s at their door.”

When the knock comes

No one needs to tell Sheriff’s Deputy John Mowry that adjustable-rate loans have contributed to the rising foreclosure rate in Lorain County.

Each morning, he leaves the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office armed with dozens of civil summons complaints that he will deliver to homeowners informing them of their financial fate. Service is the first step in the months-long process of foreclosure, but the hardest part to witness.

“There are a lot of people out there in denial, but I knock them right back into reality when I knock on their door,” he said. “It’s sad, because there are a lot of people out there who are really trying; they really want to keep their homes. But before they know it, I’m standing there telling them they could lose their house.”

Mowry’s role in the process is  a small one, arriving months after the first payment is missed, but it provides a look at the bigger picture.

He joined the Sheriff’s Department’s civil division five years ago, when the county’s foreclosure rate was about 1,300 for the year.

But with each passing year, he noticed he was getting busier and busier — so much so that in 2007, he couldn’t think of taking a break as banks filed more than 2,200 complaints.

Now, Mowry sees firsthand stories that break your heart.

There’s the woman who missed four mortgage payments as she battled cancer, and the man who lost his job, but was too ashamed to tell his wife their lifestyle had to change.

No one neighborhood is immune, either. He travels to North Ridgeville, Elyria, Lorain, Avon and Avon Lake alike, with notices that take up a full seat in his county-issued Ford Taurus.

“I do so many houses in a week, it all starts to run together like a blur sometimes,” he said. “It’s bad out there. Anyone could lose their house.”

Mowry said he issued 30 to 40 summonses a week last year. This year’s foreclosure numbers have not been as high, but the evictions are higher — signaling that homeowners who vowed that they’d never see him again were unable to work out deals to keep their homes.

After that first visit, which is often filled with crying homeowners and awkward conversations, Mowry said he hopes he never has to return to some homes. He doesn’t want to be that person who has to stand guard as movers toss children’s toys into cardboard boxes and haul them off to storage units.

“I know those toys belong to kids who have no idea when they get home from school their home won’t be theirs anymore. You try to stay out of it, but you can’t help put wonder, ‘My God, what are these people going to do?’ ” he said.

Moving out, moving on

Standing inside the warm sunroom attached to the back of her home, Jose (pronounced Joe-see) Gordon of Elyria looks out of the window toward her backyard.

It’s barren and cold from winter’s fury, but Gordon proudly proclaims it’s not always like that. As soon as spring’s sunlight dances across her lawn, Gordon, 67, said she rushes outside and begins to prepare a corner of the lot for a vegetable garden.

Each time she turns the hardened dirt, she breathes new life into the yard, resurrecting it for yet another year.

It seems as if the earth yearns for her touch, she said, and has always responded accordingly. It’s a ritual that has played out since 1969, when Gordon, her husband, the now-deceased John Gordon, and a growing brood of children moved into the four-bedroom house on the 300 block of 13th Street. After living in the slums of south Chicago — a place with concrete as far as the eye could see —moving to a place with actual green grass was like a dream come true.

But there will be no garden this year — or at least there will be no garden tended with Gordon’s hard work. That’s because the sunroom she so adamantly wanted so she could overlook the backyard where her husband died in 1998 was the start of a vicious storm that would wipe out life as she knew it.

“I’ve got 40 years of memories to move out of here,” she said Wednesday, in a tone that showed she had resigned herself to her fate. “My six kids were raised right here in this house. My husband died in that backyard. People who have never owned a home of their own don’t understand that kind of history, and now it’s all going to be gone.”

So, how does a woman well into the prime of her life lose a home she once owned outright just because she wanted to add a sunroom?
Easy, Gordon said.

When Gordon’s husband died in 1998, an insurance policy paid off the home mortgage, leaving Gordon with nothing but maintenance, insurance and taxes to worry about. However, in 2001, Gordon said she decided to take out a $14,000 second mortgage to pay for the addition.

And for four years, everything was fine. Her mortgage payment was affordable — only $440. But Gordon soon learned that wouldn’t last.

A little more than a year ago, Gordon said a new mortgage coupon was sent to her house in the amount of $749. It was hard on a fixed monthly income of $1,500, but Gordon said she made that payment.

Then the next month the bill jumped to $1,001. Gordon immediately got on the phone looking for an answer from her Michigan-based lender. What she learned was that she should have read the fine print.

She was smack dab in the middle of a bad loan, and there was little she could do. After not being able to pay the $1,001 mortgage for a few months, Gordon said the bill jumped to $1,400.

“When it first happened, I just thought, ‘OK, this is going to get cleared up,’ ” she said. “But what can I do? I don’t have the money to fight a mortgage company. Who can?”

Fast forward several months.

Gordon is still on 13th Street, but not for long. Her home is to go up for sheriff’s sale Wednesday. But if she can get her Chapter 13 bankruptcy filed before then, she will have bought herself two, maybe three months.

Now, she is packing up all her family’s belonging and looking for a two-bedroom apartment for her and her grandson, an 11-year-old who is almost as tall as his petite “Nana,” and who is happy to have her after his mother died from a long illness on Nov. 11.

“He keeps saying ‘Nana, this is mine and your house now. I’m going to be the man.’ But I keep having to remind him that Nana can’t keep the house. We’re going to have to move out,” she said.

As for the sunroom, it is now filled with what Gordon calls junk — stuff she has pulled out of closets, drawers and chests that will be either sold, given away to charity or packed away in cardboard boxes and taken to the apartment she will soon call home.

The space that is flooded with warmth and sunlight even on a bitter cold January day is filled with piled up with pieces of her life — Christmas decorations that she painstakingly put up around the house,  the toys and outgrown shoes of her grandchildren and framed, sepia-tone photos of her children and husband.

“I don’t think about losing my home too much,” she said. “I try to push it to the back of my mind because to think about it just makes you sick.”

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com. 

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