Subprime Meltdown: Expressed By Depressed Homes In The Bronx
Williamsbridge — The glass is gone from the windows of 767 East 216th St. The wooden house sits on a sinking yard — its windows staring out with dead unblinking eyes. At 762 East 217th St., menus and newspapers clutter the tiny vestibule, the front door doesn’t lock and the buzzers don’t buzz, although people still live in the apartments. The house at 749 East 213th St. just looks disappointed; the proud brick three-story could have sheltered several families but it faces the intersection hollow, no glass in its storm door, no life in its windows. At 1041 East 216th St., newly built and utterly empty, a line of pink violation notices from the Department of Buildings hangs like some sad bunting welcoming the foreclosure age.
This is what the subprime meltdown looks like: block after block of brick one and two family homes in this working class neighborhood in the northeast Bronx are for sale, in foreclosure proceedings or simply abandoned, blank doors and windows gaping like open mouths. Fifteen lis pendens — notices of foreclosure — were filed for property in Williamsbridge since February 15. There were 86 during January; 54 in December.
There are six homes in foreclosure or headed there on one short block of East 217th Street, just off the commercial district of White Plains Road. Tenants at 720, a newly constructed brick building sold as co-ops, are in foreclosure. CitiBank’s mortgage unit alerted the owner of 732 just up the block that it began foreclosure proceedings the day before Valentines. 746 is in foreclosure. So is 747 across the street. And 760 is up for auction. And 762 next door. And Nancy Lewis at 815 on the corner of the next block is getting notices from Washington Mutual, who sold she and her handyman husband a $400,000 mortgage in 2006.
“A lot of people got scammed,” she said last week, after picking up her daughter from school. “People got riped off. Mhmm. And I’m one of them,” she said, shaking her head. The Lewises bought their house so their grown children and grandchildren could all gather in one place. “We wanted a place they could all come to, a backyard for the kids to play.”
Ms. Lewis was reluctant to discuss her finances in detail, but the $3,000 a month mortgage payments are unaffordable. She believed the mortgage broker’s version of new math when he sold she and her husband their home, not realizing until later that brokers earn a cut of every mortgage they sell, the bigger the mortgage, the bigger the cut.
She’s not alone. In 2006 Williamsbridge had one of the highest rates of homeownership in the Bronx, 31 percent, nearly matching the citywide average, according to data analyzed by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Public Policy. But while the neighborhood had the highest rate of mortgage lending in the borough bankers once shunned, a full 50 percent of those mortgages, and 51 percent of home equity loans, were subprime.
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