In some sections of Providence, entire blocks are being emptied and boarded up. City officials say that some of the vacant houses are constantly being broken into and vandalized.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

PROVIDENCE — Garbage pails outnumber residents on this sorry side street in the city’s West End.

On this warm summer afternoon, the sidewalk along Ware Court is broken and empty — like the houses. All but one, that is.

The two-story cottage at the end of the block is home to the Lewis family. They bought the house in 2001. Now they are, literally, Ware Court’s sole remaining residents. Their neighbors have all lost their homes to foreclosure.

“When we bought it, every house on this street people lived in,” says Terri Lewis. Now, “every house on the street is in foreclosure but mine.”

Lewis, who is 47, feels trapped. Her 13-year-old daughter, Alexis, is not allowed to go outside alone. If Terri Lewis’ husband is working late at his job for a security company in Boston, she and her daughter stay locked inside.

One day, Lewis was driving her husband to work and saw a man dart out of the house next door. She tried to snap his photo with her cell phone, but the picture didn’t come out. Another time, she caught four men across the street cutting out the copper pipes. She called the police but the thieves took off.

“The police don’t come any more,” she said, seated in her living room stroking her poodle. “They must think Mrs. Lewis is crazy because I’m forever calling them.”

For the Lewis family, the usual measures of the real-estate market’s collapse can’t describe all that they’ve lost. In their neighborhood, like others in the city’s poorer sections, entire blocks are being emptied and boarded up.

At the end of June, vacant properties in Providence numbered slightly more than 950 — about 300 more than during the last real-estate bust, in the early 1990s recession, according to the city’s director of planning and development, Thomas E. Deller.

At last count, 422 of the city’s properties were bank-owned, although the number keeps rising as more people walk away from properties that they are unable or unwilling to pay for.

Deutsche Bank National Trust, an arm of Germany’s biggest bank, owns more than 100 houses in the city, including 3 across the street from the Lewis home. Deutsche represents investors around the globe who bought securities backed by the mortgages that are now in foreclosure.

One of the three houses — the bungalow at 6 Ware Court — had a history of housing-code violations when its former owner, Able A. Mora, defaulted on the mortgage and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in May 2007.

It took five months before Deutsche Bank legally took ownership of the property by filing a foreclosure deed. In a complaint filed against Deutsche Bank dated Nov. 7, 2007, the city listed 16 counts of violations, including broken windows, missing baseboards, a leaking bathroom and a missing sink.

“These houses on Ware Court are constantly being broken into — constantly,” said Jasmin Checo, prosecution coordinator for the city’s department of inspection and standards. “If you replaced the baseboard, that would be stolen right away, so that’s a really hard violation to tell a bank you have to correct.”

The bank’s property manager has since repaired the exterior violations, Checo said, but the interior ones, such as the missing bathroom sink, have yet to be corrected. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for housing court in the Public Safety Complex on Thursday.

Francisco Ramirez, director of the city’s department of inspection and standards, said that the banks are “getting better at responding and taking care of the properties.” But with so many foreclosures, he said, it’s an uphill battle.

On Ware Court last Thursday morning, two skinny cats prowled near the van parked outside the Lewis house. Lewis said her neighbors down the block left behind the cats, so she winds up feeding them.

Lewis said that she’s been looking at houses with a real-estate agent. She found one she likes on a quiet street in another part of the city, but she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to sell hers.

That morning, like so many mornings, the door to the boarded house next door was wide open. Across the street, someone had also unlocked the door to 6 Ware Court and left it ajar.

At 4 p.m., a silver Honda pick-up truck had parked on the even-numbered side of the block and a tanned woman wearing a dress and sandals with a cell phone hooked around her ear was walking just outside house number 6.

Joy E. Riley, president and principal broker of Westcott Properties, in Providence, was checking the properties that she is marketing for the bank. Westcott, a real-estate brokerage firm that has built a lucrative business selling bank-owned properties, had received a call earlier in the day from the city’s department of inspection and standards that a reporter had noticed that the door to one of its properties was open.

Riley was talking into the wireless earpiece of her phone when Lewis, the neighbor from across the street, recognized the real-estate broker’s adult son, Michael, standing next to the truck and walked over to say hello.

“Every time something happens, I call him,” Lewis said, “and he comes.”

“We keep trying to stay on top of it,” Joy Riley said. “We really count on people to calls us” to report problems.

Asked if the properties had any prospective buyers, Riley replied, “Yes, there’s interest.”

Lewis piped up. “You want to put that one on the market?” she said, pointing to her house.

larditi@projo.com