Honey Williams surveys the neighborhood from her front porch on East 144th wearing a leopard-print mumu and a welcoming smile. With one hand she's pulling at one of the two nephews she babysits while her husband's at work as he slaps around a pit bull puppy and laughs at the top of his lungs. With the other she's pointing at the boarded-up properties in every direction, more graffitied plywood than windows. When she moved into her roomy sky-blue rental just a year ago, there was trouble now and again: fights and drug deals and break-ins. But it didn't look like the ghost town it is today.

On Honey's block, recognized by city leaders as one if not the worst hit by foreclosures in the city, 37 properties out of about 140 have been foreclosed upon in just three years, leaving behind the fearful and the fearsome to pick at the scraps. "I'll tell you, I wasn't here for the first Depression," she says, "but it looks like I've got a front-row seat for this one."

She can't help but think about growing up at 105th and Pierpoint, not far from here and yet worlds away. "There were people who cared. People'd look out for your kids, make sure their parents found out about where they'd been. Nowadays, nobody wants to look after these kids. We used to have block parties and everything."

A big American flag slaps in the wind a few feet from her face, adding an ironic touch when she says, "God bless America. Can you imagine the crew a block party would draw here today?"

Honey raised three daughters by herself who are struggling with kids of their own now, and she finds it hard to offer anything in the way of encouragement.

"Downtown, welfare ain't giving you nothin' these days, and [the price of] everything's going up, everything but your paycheck," she says. "There used to be churches on every corner around here. Then it was bars on every corner. Now, the bars can't even stay in business or if they do, they're overrun with these kids who'll shoot the place up if somebody steps on their shoe."

Councilman Zack Reed has publicly ranked Honey's block, just south of Kinsman, one of the rankest in his ward, a "war zone."

Just down the road, a middle-aged man creaks across Kinsman at 143rd Street with a cane but some pep in his step and a little baggie of what looks like Wild Irish Rose. He asks for a cigarette. His teeth are gone.

"You a reporter?" he asks, lighting up and eyeing the notebook.

"Yessir."

"Nothing to see here," he says with a giggle, and keeps on walking.

NINA TURNER "There's profit in poverty."

Inside Your Snack Shack, Bob Batch tends the front counter like he has for 23 years. In about 10 minutes, four people come in to either play taxes (support the Ohio Lottery) or buy malt liquor or fortified wine. He greets them all with a casual nod and grin. Until a few years back, there was enough traffic to make a small profit, Batch says. Then Save-a-Lot moved in a few blocks down Kinsman and stole much of his grocery business. Still, he might have been okay, getting by on the booze and scratch-off and candy sales, if the neighborhood weren't disappearing.

"What we have is less people, and what's left aren't getting to me," he says. "A lot of people have moved out of this place. Those people used to be walking by me. I wonder how much longer before I go under, how much longer I can hold on. I don't know if I'll be able to. I'd like to sell, get out ahead like I planned." He shakes his head and rolls his eyes at the silliness of the thought.

Poverty and joblessness have for time immemorial intensified desperation, shredded families and dreams, fed gangs and prisons and dope dens. Some escape; others stagnate. At times in our history we've tried earnestly to break the cycle. Other times, like in this young century, we've focused our collective attention elsewhere while market forces battered the vulnerable like a hurricane. And the subprime mortgage explosion was the economic Katrina; Northeast Ohio the Gulf Coast.

Subprime lending, blamed for as much as 85 percent of the nearly 15,000 foreclosures in Cuyahoga County last year, tripled the number of foreclosures in a decade. In Cleveland alone, about 10,000 homes are empty. Many have been picked clean and are many thousands of dollars from meeting code, if they're salvageable at all. The city will raze 1,000 of them this year, a marked improvement from years past.

After the foreclosure victims themselves, those most affected are the neighbors, who may not have been much better off themselves. But the ripple effect extends outward, affecting the neighborhood, the city, the county, the entire region.

"A family [buys] food, pays rent, uses public transit, schools, pays property taxes," says Norm Krumholz, Cleveland State professor and former city planning director. "And all that is gone when that family leaves."

Councilwoman Nina Turner is anxious to hit the road, show the two sides of her ward in person: the part that has withstood the foreclosure crisis, the single-family homes that still manage to be 90 percent owner-occupied by a population made up almost completely of black folks, the bigger yards than those antiques downtown, the sweeping parks, the pride; and she wants to show the blight that has reduced whole sections elsewhere to models of urban decay.

Though the media, both local and national, have focused much attention on Cleveland's Slavic Village - often referring to it as "ground zero" - Turner's ward is just as ravaged, if not more. According to first-quarter 2008 figures provided by the county's 2-1-1 First Call for Help, Turner's ward accounted for the most requests for assistance with foreclosures and predatory lending. Slavic Village came in second.

Her assistant, Terrell Pruitt, pulls out of the Harvard Community Services Center toward DeForest Avenue. For several minutes, it's well-manicured homes with breathing room and tall, fat trees everywhere. "This was one of the first wards where black people chose to live in the area and that perception has lasted over the years," Pruitt notes. His and Turner's parents were among them.

But a quick turn ends the reverie. A long row of vacant factories on Miles dumps out onto the intersection of Lee, where 35,000 cars pass every day by the old long-empty Beehive School with its cockeyed windows smashed to shards.

"They're finally getting around to tearing this down after years and years," Turner says. Pruitt pipes in again, "For a half-million dollars we finally get an empty field."

They steer through the tidy Cleveland Industrial Park and its wealth of multimillion-dollar corporations, on into Miles Heights, one of Turner's most distressed areas. It's one vacancy after another, punctuated by graffiti, angry dogs, suspicious stares and garbage everywhere.

"What you have is all these vacancies making the poverty more pronounced," says Turner, spoken like the doctoral student in urban studies and professor at Tri-C that she is.

They end at a newer-model home near Sunview and 153rd, which was recently foreclosed, vacated and, the very next day, shat on by a large group who descended on its backyard basketball court at night and proceeded to break the windows and kick holes in the walls. The police were called by a neighbor, Melissa Parker, who was raised in the identical home next door where she now raises her kids. But the cops had more pressing business elsewhere and couldn't stay to keep the trespassers from returning.

"I just thought it was terrible," Parker says. "Where's the respect?"

"The village is sick so we're raising sick children," Turner tries to explain. "So not only do we get all these vacant properties, but then we're going to get them torn apart too."

That doesn't mean Turner excuses the greed that led to so many dreams of home ownership being dashed. And she doesn't appreciate how the statistics line up, either.

According to a study released late last month by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case, "Even when they are compared with whites of similar income, [African Americans'] rates of receiving high-cost subprime loans are two to four times higher. Racial segregation and disparities in the loan products African Americans receive play in a highly significant spatial concentration of foreclosures that brings down surrounding property values and further fuels the foreclosure process."

This dynamic is illustrated best by overlaying maps showing the highest concentrations of subprime foreclosures and the highest concentrations of black people. Each data set forms a perfectly overlapping crescent moon stretching from East Cleveland to downtown and then back southeast. That little tidbit was presented at a local congressional subcommittee meeting held by US Rep. Dennis Kucinich and is the kind of news that flips Turner's ordinarily placid demeanor to boil.

"There's profit in poverty," she says. "And there's no doubt that African Americans have suffered under decades of institutional racism. Fine. But what are we going to do about it? Are we going to educate ourselves or are we going to be fooled again?"

The Case study (available at povertycenter.case.edu), which urges financial literacy training and a mandate for fair and sound mortgage products, couldn't have been clearer about the implications: "Without intervention, most of these high-cost subprime foreclosed properties will proceed to sheriff's sale and vacancy with all of the losses that entails for households and communities ... If they are not quickly reoccupied, foreclosure can lead to abandoned properties that are projected to cost millions in terms of nuisance abatement and clean up."

You don't need to tell Garfield Heights Mayor Tom Longo that. He's had the job for 25 years now and remembers when there were maybe a dozen vacancies at a time. Now, he's got nearly 1,000 vacancies in a city of 12,000 homes, with an estimated 100 new foreclosures so far this year. That could mean 1,000 lawns to mow, inspect, field calls about. And that's done by either adding workers to the city payroll or taking others away from their ordinary duties.

"In the old days you had to be able to afford to buy a home to actually buy it, to put a down payment down of like 20 percent, things like that," Longo says. "All that went by the wayside. And so we had a lot of people with houses that they probably knew in the beginning that they really couldn't afford."

His economic development director, Noreen Kuban, adds, "It's not just the property owner, though. There's a lot of people involved along the way, from the mortgage broker, to the real estate agent, the appraiser, the lender. All these people have been pushing this along and they had financial incentives to get people into these types of loans. They get their commission when they get their loan, not when the loan is viable."

And then, Longo says, there are ordinary, hard-working residents led into accepting adjustable-rate mortgages when they probably could have qualified for something fixed and grounded in reality.

He cites a case he's familiar with: an Ethiopian immigrant, a nurses' aide at MetroHealth and single mother who put $45,000 down on a $160,000 house in Longo's city, and still was steered into an adjustable-rate mortgage that will jump from a 5.6 percent interest rate to 10.6 in the fifth year. She's currently working with the East Side Organizing Project, one of about 15 help agencies in the area, to renegotiate the terms.

Longo isn't all that hopeful.

"Who in their right mind would put somebody putting $45,000 down into an adjustable-rate loan?" he wonders. "It's criminal. Every case is a little different, but here in the City of Homes, we're getting decimated. This is not the kind of business we should be in."

Everybody appears to be in a holding pattern too, he says, even many of his older residents who'd wished to migrate south years ago. The nuisance lawsuit filed by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson against the largest investment firms likely will take years to resolve. Congress starts to craft legislation to ease the crisis but President Bush threatens a veto; his own proposed fix to freeze rates for five years was largely ignored as too reactionary. The state legislature performs subtle tinkering to lending laws, nothing of note, and county Prosecutor Bill Mason starts investigating mortgage fraud case by case, another lengthy though needed process, while the private sector continues to hold up their contracts as proof of absolution.

So leaders like Longo are pressed to make decisions: keep doing more with less, or ask residents to dip deeper into their pockets to keep their city shining?

The banquet hall at the Holiday Inn in Strongsville feels like the county- fair cow barn with chandeliers and chintzy carpeting. An auctioneer warbles through his spiel as an organist plays carnival waltzes between each sale. Dreams are on the auction block, and no one here can remember when they've gone this cheap.

This is May's installment of Hudson & Marshall's regular auction of Cleveland foreclosed properties.

Theresa Fullwood, 43, of Cleveland, is here with her husband, Wesley, to buy another slice of their future pie. They bought a rental unit here nearly a year ago, have worked it over and have already made back their initial investment by serving a Section 8 family. Now they're back looking for something bigger for themselves to move into.

"He's been doing remodeling and he's been doing it for other people, so we want to do it for us now," Theresa says.

A three-bedroom, two-bath in Warrensville that the couple was considering a bid on ends up selling to someone else for $31,000. Wesley is floored. "That's a nice area," he marvels. "Everything there's selling north of $115,000 at least." He shakes his head in shock.

The auctioneer sells off one vacant lot in Euclid for $500. "A good opportunity to start your own Christmas-tree farm," he notes in fast forward. Another lot goes for the same price: "Took the wind out of my sails!" he claims. House after house in embattled Cleveland sells for a few grand each. Heads shaking is a common sight. In University Heights, a tony ranch-style four-bedroom goes for $39,500, half its estimated value. "Whoa!" several in the crowd blurt out.

Jeff Nettles, a 38-year-old RTA worker from Warrensville, figures this is where he'd like to buy his first home. "I've looked at a lot of these houses, and some of the ones that are going for $1,500 or $3,000, they're all worth nothing. You might as well give them away. But there's ones I've seen for $5,000 or $10,000, they just needed some paint and some carpet and they're ready for move-in day."

"The banks are making a lot of deals right now," says Pat Wheeler, an agent with DreamTeam Realty. "They've got way too much in their portfolios."

Keith Langford, a Wells Fargo loan representative, calls them "unbeatable prices, heaven for investors. One man came and bought a house he knew was on the radar of a family that had only $2,000 to put down and so they couldn't even bid. He ends up buying it for $7,500 and the family turns around and, right away, offers him $10,000 for it over time. Now, that's still an amazing deal for a house, but that investor, in just, like, a few minutes, made $2,500."

Others are thinking bigger than that. Mike Amin, who owns the popular Blue Sky restaurant in Amherst and a car dealership in Lorain, started buying up properties in and around Cleveland about a year ago. He's got 25 so far. He'll stop at 100 or $1 million, whichever comes first.

"I spend a million and I will get back in a few years $6 [million] or $7 million," he predicts, then starts to whisper to avoid sharing trade secrets. "I don't need money now. What I do - I started this a year ago - I fix them to code and rent them out Section 8, and in five years, believe me, I'm going to be free."

At least somebody's still living the dream.

Related: BROKEN: How Greed Brought the Global Subprime Mortgage Industry Tumbling Down.