A Cleveland Charity’s Fighting Spirit Helps Stem a Tide of Foreclosures
By Michael Anft
CLEVELAND
Mount Pleasant hasn’t lived
up to its name in decades. The
once-vibrant neighborhood of
hulking wood-frame homes in
this city’s southeastern corner
has long been ravaged by blight,
drugs, and joblessness.
But it’s been hit especially
hard in just the past few years
by crime and by foreclosures.
About 15,000 people a year have
left the Cleveland metropolitan
area in the past decade—a rate
of abandonment that nationally
ranks second only to parts of
post-Katrina New Orleans.
Anita Gardner nearly joined
the exodus. But three years
ago, she made her way from her
Mount Pleasant home to a local
charity for help dealing with
her subprime mortgage, which
was about to go into foreclosure.
After getting her loan modified,
organizers at the nonprofit that
assisted her—Empowering and
Strengthening Ohio’s People,
best known by its acronym,
ESOP—encouraged her to get
out and meet her neighbors.
The result is Mount Pleasant
Concerned Citizens, a group of
activist volunteers who knock
on doors, talk to residents about
the problems they’re facing, and
work on solutions. The neighbors have persuaded police to
shutter a drug house in the
neighborhood and increase foot
patrols. They won the commitment of a housing-court judge to
look at ways to get rid of long-vacant homes and to curtail the
“flipping” of decaying properties from one out-of-town speculator to another. And they
have fought an outpatient mental-health facility that they say
would get most of its patients
from outside Mount Pleasant.
ESOP “helped me help myself
and my neighbors,” says Ms.
Gardner, who recently became
its treasurer. The organization’s
founder, Inez Killingsworth,
says Ms. Gardner, “taught me
how to find my voice and to use
it to speak for myself.”
about banks and the fissures
they were tearing open in communities. Cuyahoga County,
where Cleveland and its suburbs are situated, served as
Exhibit A. More than 60,000
homes have been foreclosed in
the county since 2005.
Despite all of its activity on
behalf of borrowers, ESOP was
teetering financially in 2005, as
the mortgage crisis roiled.
“We were running on
$100,000 a year, and we probably had three people on staff,”
Ms. Killingsworth says. “And I
don’t get paid.”
PHO TOGRAPHS BY TALKING EYES MEDIA/CIVIC VEN TURES
“It’s unfortunate to say, but we’re doing better now because of others’ misery,”
says Inez Killingsworth, who founded a grass-roots group that aids troubled homeowners.
we’re doing better now because
of others’ misery,” says Ms. Kill-
ingsworth. “We’ve hired people
who have been foreclosed on.”
ESOP now has a staff of 50—
up from only a handful a mere
five years ago—and will likely
hire 15 more within the next
year. Its budget sits at $2.4-
million, much of it from grants
from the very banks ESOP has
cajoled and harassed into clean-
ing up their messes.
A Scrappy Approach
Under Ms. Killingsworth’s
leadership, ESOP has hatched
a method for connecting neighbors who are tired of watching
their neighborhoods wither. The
organization persuades people
who seek the help of its foreclo-sure-relief program to work to
save not only their homes but
also their neighborhoods.
That method is resolutely confrontational, scaring off some
grant makers and other potential supporters.
Yet the implosion of the economy has not only increased
the number of households that
need ESOP’s help, say some observers, but also vindicated its
scrappy approach.
The group’s work here and in
other distressed parts of Ohio
has earned Ms. Killingsworth
a 2010 Purpose Prize, an award
given by Civic Ventures, a think
tank in San Francisco that encourages older Americans to do
good works. A former janitor in
Cleveland schools, Ms. Killingsworth, 72, was one of 10 winners over age 60 who were recognized for bringing innovation
to bear on solving social problems. She was also one of five
winners this year to receive the
top prize of $100,000.
Her organization is thriving: In the past three years,
ESOP has opened 10 more offices throughout Ohio, allowing
the group to aid 8,000 tenuous
mortgage holders statewide. In
four out of five cases the charity
takes up, lenders reduce interest rates and eliminate or lower
penalties for getting behind on
mortgages.
“It’s unfortunate to say, but
Prize-Worthy Leaders
Read about all 10 of this
year’s Purpose Prize winners
—and see video reports
on five of them, including
Barry Childs (right) of Africa
Bridges. Go to:
‘Where Are the People?’
Ms. Killingsworth formed
ESOP in 1993 after winning
some battles against stray
dogs and long-vacant housing
in Union-Miles, the Cleveland
neighborhood where she and her
husband raised five children.
Started as the Education/Safe-ty Organizing Project, and then
morphing into the East Side Organizing Project, ESOP initially
fought to relieve overcrowding
in public schools and address
neighborhood safety issues.
But the organization struggled. For years, ESOP lacked
financial support, employing
only one organizer. Because
of its in-your-face tactics—
angry protesters once staked out
the home of the girlfriend of
Cleveland’s mayor, for example—ESOP lost grant makers
that had supported it early on,
including the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York, and the
George Gund Foundation, in
Cleveland.
During much of the 1990s,
the group’s tiny staff fought
redlining, the practice of limit-
ing services, including banking,
in low-income areas. African-
American neighborhoods have
been hit especially hard, Ms.
Killingsworth says, preventing
many creditworthy people from
buying homes. “You couldn’t
buy a house if you were black,”
she says. “You’d go to the bank
and they’d tell you that you had
enough credit to buy a Cadil-
lac.”
But by redlining neighbor-
hoods, banks created a vacuum
that was eventually filled by
predatory lenders and mortgage
brokers. Bigger banks, eager
to bundle the resulting shaky
home loans together to sell to in-
vestors, tacitly encouraged bad
practices that tore apart many
lives—and neighborhoods.
Winning Over Banks
But the organization won
over some important people.
Bankers, who responded to
ESOP’s sometimes-dramatic
methods, coupled with Ms. Killingsworth’s calmer requests
that they participate, decided
to work with ESOP clients to
modify their loans. Many banks
agreed to donate the clients’
$200 in fees to ESOP; in turn,
the charity helped devise new
mortgage terms.
In addition, several county
and state officials used federal
dollars designed to stem foreclo-
sures to help ESOP grow. Offi-
cials laud the group’s methods
for dealing with the borrowers
who have inundated its Cleve-
land office, where a large, smil-
ing plastic shark hangs from the
center of the ceiling. “I have few
heroes in life, but Inez is one of
them,” says Jim Rokakis, the
longtime treasurer of Cuyahoga
County. “She saw what was hap-
pening a decade ago. Together,
we confronted the Federal Re-
serve Bank here about these
out-of-whack loans. They didn’t
do anything about them. But
she has been airing her voice
ever since and has been getting
in banks’ faces, urging them to
make things right.”
Some bank officials say ESOP
provides a valuable service to
them—keeping people in homes
and paying at least some money
toward their mortgages.
“ESOP has been the most suc-
cessful group helping homeown-
ers,” says Ronald M. Faris, pres-
ident of Ocwen Loan Servicing,
in West Palm Beach, Fla., which
services tens of thousands of
mostly subprime mortgages
owned by other banks. “Custom-
ers who receive a loan modifica-
tion from us who were helped by
ESOP have a much better suc-
cess rate in remaining current
on their mortgage.”
He adds, “I think the world of
Inez and what she is doing. She
is one of those quiet leaders,
much like Ben Franklin was in
his later years. She doesn’t say
a lot, but when she speaks up,
people listen.”
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extras
‘Let’s Hit ’Em’
