Dozens of city employees and contractors flooded foreclosure-plagued Hendry Street in Dorchester yesterday for a concentrated burst of cleaning and staging that felt like the bustle on a movie set.
Workers installed new street signs, removed old cars, blasted paint from buildings, and swept trash from the street.
Just as Mayor Thomas M. Menino prepared to address a press gaggle, workers attached a sign to the building behind him announcing "The Hendry Street Project."
City officials said three-block Hendry Street may host Boston's largest concentration of foreclosed properties. Mortgage companies have seized at least eight homes on the street. All sit empty, with boards on the windows and doors.
The area has become a dumping ground and a haven for criminal activity, officials and residents say.
Menino said the city is determined to revive the street.
"This is a cancer that we have in our city that's taking over a neighborhood," he said. "We will not tolerate this cancer."
The mayor said the city is negotiating to buy several of the houses for as little as $30,000. It is moving to seize other foreclosed properties on which the owners have not paid taxes. They would be renovated and added to the inventory of subsidized rental housing.
Ronald Davis has lived on Hendry Street for 25 years. He said conditions have never been as bad as in the past year. As the homes around him emptied last summer, he tried to sell his house, but could not find a buyer.
"This is nice," he said yesterday. "But it would have probably helped more before so many of them went down."
The intervention will not immediately serve as a model for other parts of the city, officials said. Buying and renovating homes is expensive, and the city has not identified other areas with similar concentrations of vacant property.
But officials said they are working on a broader model for dealing with foreclosed properties, including significant fines for owners who sit on vacant properties.
Binyamin Appelbaum can be reached at bappelbaum@globe.com.
