This two-family house at 110-112 Mitchell St. between Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue has been foreclosed on, and the property next to it is locked up and is also for sale.

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The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — Homeowners in the city struggling to meet mortgage payments can start getting help renegotiating their loans Saturday during a financial workshop sponsored by ACORN, a Providence nonprofit group.

“It is our goal to help every family stay in their home,” said Sen. Juan M. Pichardo, D-Providence, one of three city legislators helping promote the workshop.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, advocates for initiatives that benefit moderate- and low-income people.

“We’re talking about an organization that is trying to help people,” said Rep. Grace Diaz, D-Providence.

Standing in front of an abandoned duplex at 110-112 Mitchell St. on the city’s South Side, Pichardo and others urged homeowners to seek help before their properties fall to the building’s fate.

The last owners, he said, apparently walked away from the house when they fell behind on their mortgage.

Since then, the duplex on a narrow lot near the Locust Grove Cemetery has been attacked repeatedly by vandals. Smashed windows and graffiti scrawls mar the front of the vinyl-covered house.

“We certainly have been hit hard locally,” Pichardo said.

About 1 in 41 mortgages in Rhode Island, on average, were in foreclosure during the fourth quarter of last year, the seventh-highest in the nation, according to the 2008 State of the Nation’s Housing report released in June by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The state’s share of “seriously delinquent” mortgages during the fourth quarter of last year was 3.9 percent, the highest in New England.

In Rhode Island, 7 percent of all first mortgages during January, February and March were delinquent or in foreclosure, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

Rhode Island’s high foreclosure rate is being fueled by its large share of risky subprime mortgages, which particularly appealed to buyers of rental properties who sought to cash in on the housing boom.

“Predatory lending has been going on in the state for a number of years now,” said Rep. Tom Slater, D-Providence, “People thought this was the American dream.”

Now, as house prices have declined, many of those properties are worth less than what the borrowers paid for them — prompting some investors to simply walk away, according to the Harvard study.

The median price of a multifamily house during the second quarter of this year was $150,000, the lowest since 2002 and 43 percent below the price a year earlier, according to data from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.

About 61 percent of the 407 multifamily houses sold during the quarter — 247 properties — were bank-owned, according to the Realtors. The steepest price declines were in Providence, where 168 multifamily houses sold and the median price fell 57.8 percent, to $105,400, according to the Realtors data.

Vivian Moreno, a single mother of three who lives in the West End, said she nearly fell victim to a “bad” mortgage.

“I was embarrassed to ask my own family for help,” she said. “I almost lost my house.”

Rather than fight with lenders on their own, as she did for a time, homeowners should seek help from community organizations such as ACORN.

“I can see the light at the end of this nightmare,” she said.

ACORN workers will staff Saturday’s foreclosure-prevention workshop, where they can review people’s finances and mortgage records. Staffers may be able to help homeowners connect with a lender to renegotiate the terms of a home loan.

“Our goal is to get people out of adjustable-[rate] loans and into fixed-[rate] loans,” said Dulce Delgado, an ACORN worker. “We work directly with the lender that they have.”

The event follows an earlier one on foreclosure-prevention cosponsored in June by ACORN, other neighborhood organizations and the City of Providence.

Like the earlier event, Saturday’s session is free to the public and will provide homeowners and renters with information on how to avoid foreclosure and protect their credit.

This weekend’s event is in the ACORN office, 807 Broad St., from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

For more information, call (401) 780-0500.

pgrimald@projo.com