Providence’s Department of Inspection and Standards is conducting a citywide sweep to account for all vacant buildings. Foreclosures skyrocketed this year.

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The Providence Journal / John Freidah

PROVIDENCE –– Street by street, lot by lot, city inspectors are undertaking a painstaking survey of boarded-up and vacant buildings, a count of the casualties of a foreclosure and lending crisis that has cost many people their houses and has inspired others to walk away from loans and from homes they cannot afford.

Members of the Department of Inspection and Standards have been sweeping through the city on special weekend duty for weeks, performing the vacant property census.

Several more weeks of work remain before they finish, said city Planning Director Thomas E. Deller.

“It’s a visual, street-by-street look,” Deller said. “If a property looks vacant, [inspectors] go look at the house, see if there’s furniture in it, see if the doors are broken, see if the electricity is turned off. We’re not actually entering properties unless they’re unlocked and open, and then we would so we can figure out how to get them boarded and secured.”

The information collected will provide city officials an objective snapshot of the wreckage left by the housing crash.

“We know there have been a lot of houses foreclosed on,” said Deller. “We’ve also heard through secondary sources and data that there are people who are walking away [from homes they can’t afford] and that there are a lot of short sales going on. And those properties are tending to be vacant. What we’re trying to do is get a handle on the problem.”

From January 2006 to the end of last month, there have been just over 1,500 foreclosures in the city, Deller said. “If you go back to the credit union crisis of the early ’90s in Rhode Island, we’re probably looking at, right now, 2.5 times as many properties affected as we did back then.”

The number of properties advertised for foreclosure sale in the first three months of this year — 1,061 — is almost triple the number in the same period last year, according to figures from the public agency Rhode Island Housing.

In addition to foreclosures, “we did have a real estate person on the South Side who was saying to my staff that some of the working class families that are really struggling are looking at the drop in market value and looking at interest rates and realizing that they’re not going to make it,” said Deller. “And they’re leaving. Not only leaving the house, but leaving the state and moving someplace else.”

A rough look at some of the data collected so far, from the Silver Lake neighborhood, suggests “there were more vacancies than I thought there were,” Deller said.

The city intends to eventually get the survey information online, and will use it to help ensure that no vacant properties are unfairly credited with a homestead exemption –– a tax credit for certain owner-occupied properties.

Mayor David Cicilline also hopes to use the vacant property census as part of his proposal to levy an “abandoned property penalty” on property owners that allow houses to remain empty.

“What we know from this foreclosure crisis is that there are some financial institutions, some of which are not even in this country, that have pieces of real estate as part of a very large portfolio and don’t have an incentive to move those properties into the hands of Providence families,” the mayor said in February. “They may in fact be tempted to hold on to the real estate and see what happens in the market in the long term.”

If the penalty is approved by the City Council, the city would use the census to help document which buildings are vacant, said Deller.

“We worked a lot in the 1990s and the early part of this decade trying to invest and to strengthen our neighborhoods, and this foreclosure thing has been very damaging,” said Deller.

Vacant properties are routinely vandalized and broken into by thieves who will scavenge whatever was left behind, especially copper wiring and pipes to sell as scrap. In the first seven weeks of this year, the Providence police took reports of at least 57 thefts or attempted thefts of copper.

One Saturday last month, Building Inspector Michael Campagnone and Renewal Inspector Rocco Quattrocchi cruised through a grid of short streets between Chalkstone Avenue and Valley Street, on a hunt for vacant buildings.

They found a vacant home on Bergen Street with a pleading message painted on the foundation, apparently addressed to thieves and vandals: “Copper is gone.”

marsenau@projo.com