Economic woes hit home, as foreclosure rate soars

Mary Adamson knows the agony of losing a home. ''I felt like I was a total failure," she said. ''I tried so hard to take care of my family and wasn't able to. I felt useless, like I was worth nothing."

After years of trying to save her three-bedroom house in Hyde Park, Adamson lost it to foreclosure April 28. She now lives in a Roslindale two-bedroom apartment with her husband.

As devastating as her story is, key elements in it have become all too common, according to Virginia Pratt, a foreclosure prevention counselor at Ensuring Stability through Action in our Community in Jamaica Plain.

''The big thing is loss of income," Pratt said. ''We see people who don't have the good jobs that they had when they got their mortgage due to a downturn in the economy.

''With the job market, in relation to the high cost of housing, they just can't afford to pay their mortgage," she said.

In a report from ForeclosuresMass Corp., a data collecting company, foreclosure rates for the first four months of 2005 in Boston and the other communities of Suffolk County are expected to escalate by almost half -- 49.8 percent -- compared with last year.

Pratt noted two common characteristics of the people she works with: They usually spend more than 50 percent of their take-home pay on their mortgage and earn less than $60,000 a year.

''A lot of our clients come from Dorchester and Mattapan, and I think they are more affected by unemployment, racial discrimination, and poverty," Pratt said. ''In the three years I've been [at Ensuring Stability], I've only had one person from Beacon Hill."

The most common reasons people get into the foreclosure predicament are ''frequent re-financing, illness, job loss, and divorce," Pratt added.

Mary Adamson's experience was in many ways similar to that description. She had bought the Cape-style house with a big deck and a backyard with her first husband in August 2000. The next May, he became ill and died. ''That's when everything started getting hectic for me," Adamson said.

It started with small bills going unpaid. In September 2002, the same month in which she remarried, she lost her job as an administrative assistant at Children's Hospital, and things took a turn for the worse. Adamson was paying her bills with unemployment benefits, which she said were about half as much as her hospital paycheck.

''It was enough to put food on the table, but not enough to cover all the bills," so she started withdrawing from her retirement fund, which lasted about six months, she said. After that was gone, she had nowhere to turn.

According to Norma Moseley, another foreclosure prevention counselor at Ensuring Stability, that chain of events is similar to what many homeowners experience on the way to foreclosure.

''With some people borrowing 100 percent, there's no margin for error," Moseley said. ''People don't have a reserve, and they have to choose between paying for heat or their mortgage, so they fall behind on their payments."

It was near the end of January 2003 when Adamson called the state welfare office for help. But, she said, she was denied even food stamps because she still owned her home. At the same time, her mortgage lender filed for foreclosure. She finally decided to sell her home.

A bid for the house came in August 2003, but due to a lengthy legal battle, the sale did not go through, so Adamson filed for bankruptcy thinking that the foreclosure would be forestalled. Instead, her mortgage company went ahead with it.

''Financially, we had nothing," she said. ''It took two years for me to get a job."

She said it was her faith that got her through the depression that descended upon her.

''I came to realize that everything I lost were material things that could be bought again," she said. ''My husband and my marriage could not be bought."

And things have finallly turned around. Adamson, 55, completed her first year of work at her new job as a receptionist earlier this month.