Coping With Chicago's Foreclosure 'War Zones'

Bryan Esenberg's job is to run the cemetery of Chicago's housing boom.

Esenberg works for a local nonprofit that steps in to prevent abandoned buildings involved in the foreclosure process from falling apart while mortgage companies, lenders, owners and investors grapple over who is responsible.

Once, he was called in because the entire facade of an abandoned house had fallen onto the sidewalk, he said.

In another case, a new family was stuck in a home with a basement full of raw sewage after the landlord had walked away.

In the foremost such suit he handled, Esenberg said, a homeowner had just packed up and remaining after acquiring a foreclosure notice. "But so the trust never foreclosed," said Esenberg, who works withNeighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. "So three years down the line, there's only this household that's been totally abandoned."

As of last year, there were around 15,000 vacant buildings in Chicago, 85 percent of which were caught in some degree of the foreclosure process, according to city figures.

Cities around the land face similar battles with such foreclosure ghost towns, struggling to deal with a growing list of empty properties left in the heat of the foreclosure crisis. Mortgage lenders alone have anywhere from 1.3 billion to 5.3 million properties on their books, the immense majority sitting vacant while lenders look for the housing market to improve.

Through government-sponsored mortgage lenders, the U.S. taxpayer owned 360,000 foreclosed homes by the end of 2010, up 47 percent from the class before, according to the industry magazine Housing Wire. That act is probably to increase, with another 600,000 mortgages guaranteed by the Federal Housing Authority estimated to go into foreclosure, according to the macroeconomic research consulting firm Capital Economics.

Story continues below

Advertisement');var debugadcode = '';document.write(debugadcode);