Border Street: Foreclosures are blooming in autumn

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Thursday, October 12, 2006

With autumn, Border Street quiets. During the day, the Teacher's Mother packs away summer clothes, cleans closets and reminds herself to tell her husband to do something about all his shoes - why does he need so many shoes, "tennies, sandals, dress shoes, cowboy boots and I don't know what else."

Next door, Longtime Eddie, struck by a cold, surrenders to his big chair in front of the television, and for hours the two retired neighbors have the street nearly to themselves. The kids are in school. Their parents are working or sleeping off the night shift. And up and down the street, driveways are empty.

The wind carries noises from other streets: kids playing at a nearby school, a hammer pounding, the beep-beep of a truck in reverse. A breeze scatters seed pods from the Fed Up Neighbor's towering honey locust tree across her lawn and onto the sidewalk, and the sound of leaves rustling is as pleasant and soothing as a lullaby.

It is a beautiful, warm fall day, and around noon, a truck pulls up across the street from Longtime Eddie's. A man with a clipboard starts walking around. He says he's looking for a foreclosure because he has been given the task of winterizing the house. He finds it at the other end of the street, a duplex formerly occupied by people recalled dimly by neighbors as "white trash and hoochie mamas." It's an address noted in past police reports for its frequent calls, including one involving a wanted man flagged by dispatchers as "hostile to police."

The residents ransacked the place before they left. A work crew has since cleaned it. What remains is dismal. Stained plywood on the floor. Holes punched in the walls and doors. The man charged with the task of winterizing pours chemicals down the toilet. "Looks like someone has been in here," he says before he leaves, locking the door behind him.

A sign taped to the window notes the property is under management of such-and-such company and please call such-and-such phone number for more information. A woman answering the company phone says the city bought the unit and will be using it as housing for low-income families.

A few doors down, a man drives up to discover another bike ramp in his yard. He sighs and shakes his head. He and his wife, known here as the Landlady, have been fixing up their duplex since the last renters left this summer. City neighborhood inspectors asked them to pave the dirt parking lot and so, a few weeks ago, they did. The new smooth surface has proved irresistible to the boys of the neighborhood, who have discovered that it, along with a worker's scaffolding in the backyard, make a perfect runway and ramp. The man has been dismantling ramps ever since.

Not long after he leaves, two men get out of a truck in front of Border Street's second summer foreclosure, the home that supplied the Mexican Grandma and her sons across the street with electricity. The men work for a company hired by the bank, and while one mows the lawn, the other goes inside to winterize, this apparently the day for such things. The house, one of the newest and most expensive on the block, is beautiful inside, although there are newspaper supplements scattered on the carpet and a stock pot growing mold in the kitchen. The people who lived here left little behind. A bag of trash, an umbrella stroller, a child's cap and gown like those used in kindergarten ceremonies.

"I'm out of Wyoming" the man says, moving quickly through the empty house. "They got me down here in Denver 'cause the foreclosures are so bad. There are 60 guys doing what we do in Denver and the area around here."

This is the seventh or eighth house of the day, he says, "and we're not done yet. We're so far behind it's not even funny. It's busier now than it ever was, but it's always busy."

Outside, schoolkids are meandering home. A paletero (vendor) honking a horn passes. One of the Mexican Grandma's sons drives up to his house. "Yeah, we moved out," he says as his wife goes inside to collect some belongings. "We couldn't pay the bills."

He says he owed the electric company more than $1,000. He says they went without electricity for almost three months and had no gas, either, which meant no hot water. We found an apartment not far from here, he says, two bedrooms, $600 a month, half what the mortgage was.

His wife climbs back into the truck. He waves his arms at the house he hung onto for four years as if shooing away a pesky dog. "We're just going to leave it to the bank. We're done with this."

The workday ends with the slamming of car doors. The Fed Up Neighbor, tired, sits outside on a bench near her front door. Three girls saunter down the middle of the street. Some boys on bicycles ride past. "Come on," one of them says, "let's make our ramp again." But, a mother calls and they pedal away and the street is empty again.

The wind gusts through the honey locust, littering the grass with more dried pods. "I'll have to clean that up," the Fed Up Neighbor says, but she sits back on her bench and enjoys the quiet for a few more minutes.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com