Ornery activists target big lender in foreclosure fight

CLEVELAND -- Folks on Humphrey Hill Drive were still waking up on the icy Saturday morning the shark hunters came to town.

They rounded the suburban traffic circle in a pair of rented school buses after a half-hour ride from far more modest neighborhoods, rumbling to a stop at the Garmone family's driveway. Forty-two caffeinated Clevelanders piled out, their leaders carrying bullhorns.

Their quarry, Mike Garmone — a regional vice president at Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation's largest mortgage lender — didn't answer his door. So they deployed, ringing bells at the big homes with three-car garages, handing out accusatory fliers and lambasting Garmone and his company's loans. Before departing, they left their calling card — thousands of 2½-inch plastic sharks — flung across Garmone's frozen flower beds, up into the gutters, littering the doorstep.

The commotion was the work of an in-your-face activist group called the East Side Organizing Project, with a paid staff then of just two, mobilized to battle Cleveland's mortgage "loan sharks." Years before the rest of the country was rocked by the fallout from aggressive lending, their neighborhoods were already home to the nation's highest concentration of foreclosures — and they were fed up.

The East Side group's members are proudly loud and abrasive, and they've long reveled in needling people with pull. But could they get a distant behemoth like Countrywide to the table?

On that morning in February 2006, Mark Seifert, executive director of the project, had his doubts. For starters, he wasn't sure his group's research on Garmone even had the family's correct address.

Until two evenings later, when Seifert checked his e-mail and found a message from a top public relations executive at Countrywide's California headquarters.

We need to talk, it said.

Seifert broke into a wide grin.

Now that David had Goliath's ear, he wasn't about to let go.

Cleveland hit especially hard

The foreclosure epidemic that has infected Cleveland's neighborhoods started earlier and has been even more punishing than the crisis much of the rest of the country is enduring. It's a symptom of the lax lending that became widely common, without the run-up in home prices that long camouflaged it.

"The problems that exist everywhere now ... showed themselves earlier here because there was no getting out of them," says Zach Schiller of Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland non-profit focused on the state's economy.

The problem is well documented — Cleveland and the surrounding county saw more than 15,000 foreclosures last year. But to grasp its impact, walk with Nita Gardner down the block of East 113th Street where she raised two boys.

When Gardner, a retired machinist, bought the gray wood-frame house 33 years ago, this part of the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood was filled with families. Their homes on small lots were modest, but maintained with pride.

Have a look at what's left.

The white house on the opposite corner — its front porch ripped away by scavengers — fell to foreclosure last year. The home behind it — blue with plank-covered windows — went soon after.

A few doors down from Gardner, three homes in a row are abandoned. Three of the four across from them are vacant, too. It's not like some manicured suburban neighborhood, where it's a guess if a house is empty. Here, shredded curtains flap from holes where windows used to be. The silver fringes of insulation hang from walls where aluminum siding has been stripped for resale.

In early 2006, Gardner's adult sons — who had bought the house from her — fell behind on their mortgage and the lender, Countrywide, began foreclosure.

Gardner stepped in to fight, although looking at the home's drab exterior and the surrounding neighborhood, it's not immediately clear why.

Until, that is, Gardner opens the front door and light spills over the floor to a mural of an Egyptian pharaoh she painted in gold and azure across the living room wall. Upstairs, a closet door still bears the markings in pen where her sons charted their heights, year after year.