Welcome to fabulous Foreclosureville

IF you're searching for a neighborhood to represent all the greed and hubris that inflated the housing bubble, don't bother looking in Sunrise Manor -- at least not the part near Eldorado High School.

Most of the private pools in the unincorporated community at the base of Frenchman Mountain are the inflatable kind. Older cars and pickup trucks linger in oil-stained driveways. Crumbling concrete walls separate modest developments from public schools and major streets.

There's no Gilded Age excess here, no marble fountains or crystal chandeliers. It's just a regular, working class community populated by a racially diverse mix of families and retirees.

The only thing that makes the neighborhood exceptional is its sky-high rates of foreclosure and vacancy. It is one of several communities in the east-northeast portion of the Las Vegas Valley that's been crippled by foreclosure -- especially a 25-year-old development called Accent that, until recently, supported several group homes, rental properties and a few houses occupied by their owners. Homeowners like Mark Lemen, who lives on the corner of Ebbetts Pass and Quicksilver Circle.

"I'm tired of looking at it," says Lemen, pointing to an abandoned house across the street. "It really upsets me that they can get away with letting something like that sit there."

He's out early on a Sunday morning with a canister of insecticide, which he injects into the joints of his two-story house. A month ago, the next-door neighbors moved out. They didn't even bother to take down the Christmas lights. About a week after they left, Lemen noticed an influx of bugs.

"Who knows what they left in there, or whether they even bothered to clean out the refrigerator," he says.

Lemen is in the construction business. He works for a company that renovates apartment buildings, and business is slow.

"If I lost my job, I'd be out of here. I'd have to move back in with my dad, and I'm 47 years old. There are no jobs anymore. I'd have to pack up and let them foreclose on this place," he says.

Before the air went out of the housing market, the neighborhood teemed with renters, many of them Hispanic, who worked in the construction industry. When all the workers started leaving last year, many of the houses went up for sale, and then into foreclosure.

The foreclosiest

According to Clark County Community Resources, this neighborhood and the adjacent ones in North Las Vegas and Las Vegas have some of the highest vacancy and foreclosure rates in the county. At least a dozen properties along Stokes Street, Ebbetts Pass and Quicksilver Circle have been abandoned. In some cases, the houses have been for sale so long, even the for sale signs have vanished, leaving behind empty signposts like wooden white flags.

"As the market rebounds, there are some areas that will have more difficulty recovering than others," says Lyndee Lloyd, grants coordinator for Clark County Community Resources Management. "We're looking at the neighborhoods with older housing stock, not the ones that are brand new, which should bounce back relatively quickly when the economy recovers."

A consortium of Southern Nevada governments is applying for $367 million in federal neighborhood stabilization funding to bring some life back to neighborhoods such as this one. If approved, the money will be used for a number of things, including down payment assistance, financial counseling, buying, rehabilitation and, in some cases, demolition of properties that have fallen into serious disrepair. The region already received $64 million from the first phase of the program; the second application is for funds that would be funneled to the valley's neediest areas.

Lemen would like the county to use the money to demolish the house across the street from his. The lot could be converted to green space, which is in short supply in Sunrise Manor.

"I'd like to see them turn it into a park," he says.

Murky motives

Comprehending the foreclosure crisis on the macro level involves understanding obscure financial instruments, regulatory bodies and social trends. On the micro level, you've also got to factor in the complicated motives of individual investors, which occasionally tend towards the criminal.

The trouble at the corner of Quicksilver Circle and Ebbetts Pass started when the neighborhood welcomed three halfway homes operated by a female minister of uncertain religious pedigree. First she bought the big house on the corner of Stokes Street and Quicksilver -- the showcase property in an otherwise cookie-cutter development -- and essentially turned it over to her clients. The she purchased the small house across from Lemens and filled it with drug addicts and petty criminals. A third house on Stokes followed.

"Up until then, it had been a fairly decent, quiet neighborhood," Lemen says.

The woman operating the homes allowed her clients to wreck the houses. Then, when her operation folded, it left behind three houses in need of an overhaul. But that's not what happened. Instead graffiti artists -- many of them kids from the high school -- have turned the back of the big house into an aerosol canvas.

"This corner has always been a little run-down because of the transitional housing down the street," says Rick Moore, who moved to Quicksilver Circle in 1999.

Moore, who retired from the Navy in 1998 and works as a financial consultant, noticed the For Sale signs a year ago. They popped up across the street, and in front of the houses next door.

He watched the value of his home double, from $110,000 when he signed his mortgage to $235,000 at the height of the boom. The house, which has been upgraded and customized, is currently worth about $140,000.

Moore, who is thrifty enough to spend his Sundays replacing an ailing pump on his pickup truck, didn't pull equity out of his house during the boom. Some of his neighbors weren't so conservative.

"You'd see people riding brand new four-wheelers up and down the street," he says. "Everyone had their toys in the driveway."

The cars you see parked in the neighborhood these days aren't as nice. In fact, many of his neighbors are running automotive repair businesses out of their homes, which lures junked vehicles to the street, depressing property values and homeowners alike.

"The lady down the street tried to sell her house for six months, but I think she finally gave up," Moore says.

Another house sold at auction for $40,000. The new owners sunk at least another $25,000 into renovations -- and even laid their own brick sidewalk -- to bring the house back from the brink of decrepitude.

The houses in the neighborhood are plagued by bad plumbing, Moore says, and several still have their original PVC pipe, which is prone to breakage. If the county is serious about helping the neighborhood, then they'll do something to help the homeowners replace their pipes, he says.

"This is an older neighborhood, so there's only so much you can do. It's going to have renters, but you've got to have low-cost rental property somewhere in this city," he says.

The property seesaw

Ryan Jersey's father bought in at the beginning, when the Accent development opened in 1984. Since then, he's seen the value of his house seesaw from $240,000 to $80,000.

"About a year ago I noticed every other house on this street is for sale," Jersey says. "If I had any money, I'd buy the one right next door to this one."

Aside from plummeting property values and the spike in vacancies, Jersey hasn't really noticed a huge difference in the character of his neighborhood. There are no roving hoards of squatters or criminal gangs that have infiltrated the empty houses. It's just quiet, and maybe a little eerie.

Mitzie Wilson serves on the Sunrise Manor Town Advisory Board and works as a real estate agent.

"Yes, we have lost our value, but the market is picking up right now and good properties are selling," she says, noting that the older houses in the community have big backyards, and the southern end of the community has clear views of the Strip.

"I definitely think Sunrise Manor will recover," she says.

The downturn hasn't changed the plans of any of these Sunrise Manor residents. Moore has always intended to sell his house and return to upstate New York in a few years. By then, he thinks his house will be worth between $150,000 and $200,000 -- tens of thousands less than he might have gotten for it at the height of the boom.

"That's a reasonable price for this house," he says. "No matter what happens, we're never going back to what it was before."