PROVIDENCE — On Smith Hill in the last few months, the most popular new window dressing is a plywood board.

With foreclosures mounting around the city and across the state as part of the subprime mortgage lending crisis, abandoned homes in some of the city’s low- to moderate-income neighborhoods are falling into disrepair and becoming eyesores, places for people to throw their trash and tempting targets for vandals.

“All over the neighborhood, you see foreclosed homes boarded-up, and there are kids breaking in and hanging out inside,” said City Councilman Terrence M. Hassett, standing outside two houses on Winsor Street that were boarded up in the last three weeks.

Eighteen houses in his ward have been put up for foreclosure sale in just the last month, Hassett said. Most of the houses have been taken over by banks or mortgage companies which hold them temporarily as they look to sell to the next buyer. The banks, Hassett said, aren’t being good neighbors.

Hassett wants the buildings fenced in and secured, and he wants the banks pressured to drop the cost and sell to first-time homebuyers. The stick he hopes to use is the city’s Department of Inspection and Standards, which he hopes will start inspection sweeps around the city to pursue and prosecute landowners who don’t take care of their properties — even if they are major out-of-state banks.

“These banks [that] own the properties are not going to get off scot-free,” he said.

Councilman Luis Aponte represents Ward 10, South Providence and Broad Street. He said that his district has seen a dramatic increase in boarded-up homes as well.

“They are strewn throughout the city,” Aponte said. “It’s definitely been a visible uptick. There’s been complaints from folks throughout my district about boarded properties, abandoned properties. It seems like people are just walking away from them.”

“It becomes a blight, it becomes a nuisance, it becomes a target for vandalism,” Aponte said.

The city can cite banks and mortgage companies for code and safety violations, fine them, and eventually take them to Housing Court if they do not rectify the situation, Hassett said.

Hassett said he has been pushing the city to start sweeping his and other neighborhoods and levy fines immediately.

The head of the Department of Inspections and Standards, Francisco Ramirez, could not be reached for comment Friday or yesterday.

But one problem the city has run into already is a difficulty identifying the actual property owner, Hassett said. The structure of ownership is complicated, and the locally registered company is often representing another corporate entity based out of state.

Foreclosure proceedings are generally triggered when borrowers are 60 days to 90 days or more late on monthly mortgage payments, and the lender moves to take ownership of the property either by selling it at a foreclosure auction or marketing it through a real estate agent.

Lenders advertised 678 houses in Rhode Island for foreclosure auction during the first quarter of this year, up 122 percent from the same period last year, according to a Journal analysis of newspaper legal ads.

The pace is on track to exceed last year, when just over 1,850 homes were advertised for foreclosure sale, which was more than twice as many as in 2005.

One reason is that Rhode Island had the third-highest share of subprime loans of any state in 2005 after New York and California, according to home-loan data analyzed by Moody’s Economy.com.

Subprime lending is the practice of loaning money to borrowers who do not qualify for the best interest rates due to their credit history.

Subprime loans accounted for 22.5 percent of Rhode Island home loans originated in 2005, compared with a national average of 18.6 percent.

One major problem is that there is little available information on the number of foreclosures, and on what happens to the families who are foreclosed on, Aponte said. While the subprime lending crisis is a national problem, local authorities need to focus on families who are losing their homes and figure out how to help them before they join the city’s homeless population.

“First, we have to get good data. All data we have is anecdotal,” Aponte said. “Then, those boarded-up houses where someone used to live, you have to ask, where did those people go, how are they surviving?”

Jo-Ann Ryan, spokeswoman for Rhode Island Housing, said that the housing agency has increased its tracking of foreclosure data over the past year and is “just starting to get our arms around it.”

Providence, she said, appears to be hit harder by foreclosures than anywhere else in the state.

“We’re very concerned with the number of foreclosures,” she said.

Hassett hopes that groups like Rhode Island Housing can work with the banks to find new owners for the properties — but that will only happen if the banks drop the prices on the homes, he said.

“The banks that own these properties should lower their rates and sell these houses to first-time home buyers,” Hassett said. “If they make them affordable, they will sell them. In the meantime, I want these banks held accountable.”

With reports from Journal Staff Writer Lynn Arditi

dbarbari@projo.com