Photographs by Michael Persico

Shelter From the Storm

The foreclosure crisis hits home for kids, says one Dobbins freshman who’s seen it close up.

by Tasneem Paghdiwala

It’s a warm spring afternoon, and Tiffany Rodriguez should be in school, finishing up ninth grade at Dobbins Technical High School in North Philadelphia. She’s pacing around the house instead, searching for something to clean. There’s really nothing—she’s been cleaning the same rooms for days. Tiffany, who’s 14, hasn’t been to school in two months.

In December the Rodriguez home in Juniata Park, a quiet North Phillyneighborhood off Roosevelt Boulevard, was served with a notice of foreclosure.

Since then Tiffany has been hospitalized three times for stress-related asthma attacks—first in December and twice in March, for 10 nights total.

After her third attack she stopped going to school and was summoned to truancy court. In early April Tiffany returned to the emergency room for severe pain in her legs, a side effect of an anti-asthma steroid she’d been taking. Previously, Tiffany had near-perfect attendance in school, and she’d never been hospitalized in her life.

Tiffany says it’s the thought of losing the house that triggered her attacks. She cleans to keep herself from getting lost in that nervous daydream again. “It’s real important to keep my mind off of it,” she says.

The Rodriguez home is 1,500 square feet, a medium-sized two-story row house with yellow brick and a bright white front door. It’s close to the Boulevard, but feels far from its noise and traffic.

House proud: Tiffany Rodriguez has missed enough school due to foreclosure fears that she might have to repeat ninth grade.

During the day the block is quiet other than some young guys working on their cars and older residents sweeping their sidewalks. On warm nights Tiffany’s mom Maritza grills dinner on their little concrete porch while her daughters sit out on the deck chairs. Maritza says there’s trouble a few blocks away in either direction—fast cars, drugs, fights—but never in front of her house.

It’s tight quarters these days. There’s Maritza, 46, who works full-time at a daycare center, and her partner Dana Tanon, 44, who moved in after losing her own house to foreclosure last year.

And there’s Tiffany, her sister Jennifer, 19, and her oldest sister Lillian, 25. All three are striking, with long, dark, curly hair and tough-sweet voices, lightly touched with a Spanish accent. Lillian also has two children, ages 3 and 5.

No easy thing having four adults, one teenager, two toddlers, plus a cat and her litter of newborn kittens, all living under one modest roof in the midst of a major crisis. You might expect the house to be excusably messy. Instead, thanks to Tiffany, it’s always spotless.

“When foreclosures force children from their homes,” the study reads, “their education is disrupted, their peer relationships crumble, and the social networks that support them are fractured. Indeed, their physical health, as well as their emotional health and well-being, is placed at risk.”

Putting up a facade: Homes across the city that have gone up for sheriff’s sale this month can be found from East Germantown to Bella Vista, worth $50,000 to $450,000.

The research also calculated that some 2 million children will be directly affected by the subprime mortgage crisis, most losing their homes this year and next. In Pennsylvania 76,000 families are projected to lose their homes to foreclosure on subprime mortgages this year and next, with 61,000 kids forced to relocate with their families. (The numbers are probably much higher, since the study doesn’t consider families evicted from rental units in foreclosed buildings, or those with conventional loans.)

Naturally, foreclosures are bad for neighborhoods because they mean abandoned houses, which can quickly become vandalized eyesores. It’s also bad for the economy when foreclosure forces people to move and leave their jobs. But the study suggests it’s also going to be bad for schools.

Students who switch schools—especially frequently—typically experience both poor performance and behavioral problems.

“Students with two or more school changes in the previous year are half as likely to be proficient in reading as their stable peers,” the study reports.

These kids also do worse in reading and math, get held back more than their stable peers, and graduate half as often. They’re also 77 percent more likely to develop behavioral problems in their new schools and 20 percent more likely to show violent behavior.

First Focus also cites research showing the mortgage crisis could negatively affect children’s health: “Stable housing has also been shown to correlate with other health outcomes, from better nutrition to healthier body weight.”

Families that were approved for more expensive mortgages than they could afford, or are forced into less expensive but still unaffordable housing elsewhere by foreclosure, also have less money for healthcare and health insurance.

She started house-hunting in the summer of 2004, and brought Tiffany along to look at the Juniata Park house one day after school.

“It was really sunny out,” Tiffany remembers. “The house just looked comfortable. I liked the garage. It’s real big. And the neighbors have gardens in the front lawns. They look beautiful in the summertime. The block was so quiet. There’s no commotion here. I thought, ‘I could grow up here.’ My mom was looking at other houses, but I convinced her to buy this one. I picked this house.”

Maritza, a first-time homeowner, got a $56,500 30-year adjustable-rate mortgage through Washington Mutual. She doesn’t remember her credit score. “It must have been all right. I couldn’t buy a house if it wasn’t good, right?” Maritza admits she wasn’t a savvy buyer. At the time, she says, no one explained what an adjustable-rate mortgage is, or that her payments would go up in two years. She’s still not sure what the term means.

The family moved in a day before Tiffany’s 10th birthday in 2004. “There was no furniture or anything, but my mom baked a cake anyway, and we ate out on the porch,” Tiffany remembers. “Everyone was here—all the cousins and the aunts and uncles. It was like a birthday for the house too.”

They started fixing up the house, and Tiffany picked new paint colors for the kitchen and living room—avocado green and sherbet orange. “I wanted the house to always be vibrant, full of the sun,” she says. Her older brothers David, 22, and Louis Albert, 30, live nearby, and so do a handful of relatives.

Tiffany says the house is always filled with the smell of good food—her mother’s chicken and rice, and pork chops—and family is always coming over to eat.

Although Tiffany was diagnosed with chronic asthma when she was 3 months old, it didn’t become a concern until December. “It was never in my way,” she says. “I could do normal stuff, like run up the steps at school, no problem.”

On really hot days she’d often take a dose of Albuterol, a commonly prescribed allergy medication, and maybe Claritin in allergy season. She rarely used an inhaler. Until last year she’d never gone to the hospital for an asthma attack.

She started at Dobbins in September, and until December both her attendance and grades were good. Though she’d finished eighth grade with an F in algebra, this year she had a teacher she liked, and her grade shot up to an A. She discovered geometry, and now declares she’s “in love” with it. “I’m in love with art class too,” she says. “I love the environment of school, being around laughter and people all day.”

The house troubles really began in March of last year. Early that month Tiffany’s brother David was shot in the stomach by a former friend. He barely survived, spending several weeks in the hospital.

By that time Maritza’s oldest daughter Lillian, a former Marine, had moved to Texas with her fiance Tyson Moore, also a former Marine, and their two kids. Moore, who’s also from Philadelphia, had enlisted in the Army and was training at Fort Bliss before leaving for an 18-month tour of duty in Iraq.

With Lillian gone, Maritza quit her part-time job providing childcare out of her home to care for David when he was discharged from the hospital. She failed to make mortgage payments in March or April, but planned to return to work in May and catch up.

But in late April Maritza ruptured a tendon in her wrist. She took off from work again and was denied disability payments.

She received $158 a month in welfare, but with no savings, she didn’t make mortgage payments for the next five months. Maritza filed for bankruptcy in July, but was denied. In late November a letter was mailed to the house from Washington Mutual serving notice of foreclosure.

Maritza figured she owed $1,200 in back payments and borrowed it from family members. When she mailed a personal check to Washington Mutual, it was returned. Maritza’s partner Dana Tanon, whom the family calls “D,” called to ask why, and was told Washington Mutual required a certified check. Besides, they said, it was too late.

“They told D I had to get a lawyer, and have my lawyer talk to their lawyers,” says Maritza. “I was like, I don’t have money to get a lawyer! I’m trying to save my house!”

Once a home enters foreclosure, the owner has to move very quickly to try to stop the process. But housing counselors say mortgage companies make it very difficult to comply with deadlines. It can take a month of tenacious phone calls for a homeowner to simply reach someone at their lender’s loss-mitigation department.

Since Tanon has endured the process from start to its sad finish—she lost her own home in January—she was better prepared to help Maritza. For months Tanon has kept a detailed log of every phone conversation between Maritza and Washington Mutual, jotting down names, dates and times. Maritza’s housing counselor says that log helped forestall the foreclosure more than once.

“If it wasn’t for D, we would never have dreamed that you have to track the mortgage people like that,” says Lillian. “We’re not people who went to college. We didn’t even know what a certified check was before all this.”

Last May, shortly after her mother’s hand injury, but before the foreclosure, Lillian flew back to Philly to surprise Maritza on Mother’s Day. “When I got here, I saw that because of her hand she could barely take care of herself,” she recalls. “I had to brush her hair, help her get dressed, cook dinner every night.”

She waited until her fiance left for Iraq, then moved in with her mother, her two young children in tow. “Thank God D is here to help my mom, but I thought I should be here too. When it comes to the phone calls, my mom isn’t good for that. She just breaks down and cries.”

For days after the foreclosure notice, Maritza tried to shield Tiffany from the news. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Tiffany says. “My mom was trying not to let me worry.”

But she suspected something was wrong. “I kept hearing my mom talk in her room with the doors closed, about lawyers and court dates,” she says.

Her mom called her up to her room one night to tell her they could lose the house. “To see a person that was always so strong be scared,” Tiffany says, “it really shocked me. My mom has always taken care of everything.”

One night in early December, Tiffany began to melt down. “I started thinking about my family living in a shelter,” she says. “I thought of homeless people I’ve seen living on the street, and I thought, ‘Could that be me?’ I thought about being split apart from my mom. I was thinking about not being able to eat dinner together. My cousin lives around the corner, so I could go there. But there’s a lot of us. We couldn’t all go there.

“That’s when the chest pains start, like as if my muscles are working too hard, and there’s no space between them. Then the wheezing, these funny noises. I breathe more and more heavy. Then I get shaky. That’s when my mom takes me to the hospital.”

Tiffany spent two days in the hospital. When school reopened after the holidays, her mood darkened. She started missing school.

“I just kept thinking, ‘One morning, someone can just come and take everything away from you? Where you grew up? Where you had all your birthdays and Christmases and Thanksgivings? How is that possible?’”

Most mornings Maritza put her foot down and forced Tiffany to get up. But on March 13 Tiffany had her second attack, and then a third on March 25. She spent nine nights in the hospital, and was prescribed seven new medications, including Singulair, Prednisone and Arithromycin that she now carries around in a bulging plastic bag. “I take my pills every four hours, like a machine,” she grins.

Two weeks earlier a letter had arrived informing Maritza that the house would be put up for sheriff’s sale April 1.

But at the last minute, two days before the rally, Sheriff Green declared a moratorium on the sale of all foreclosed homes for the month of April. The Rodriguez family was safe—for the moment.

But Maritza had no idea what would happen next. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and my little girl keeps getting sick ’cause she’s scared they’re gonna put her in a foster home,” Maritza said at the time.

By that point Tiffany had stopped going to school altogether.

“Up in my room, early in the morning, I feel like I can do it,” Tiffany says. “Sometimes I get all dressed, I come downstairs with my backpack, I get right up to the door. Then the thoughts start: ‘What if the house is gone when I get home?’ And then I feel that tightness in my chest.”

When she first came home from the hospital after the last attack, Tiffany says, she went straight up to her room and slept—all day, for days, until she realized the constant sleeping was worrying her mother. That’s when she started cleaning instead.

“That’s one less thing for my mom to worry about, if I have the house looking nice when she gets home from work,” she says. “I try to talk to her when she gets home too, and not be moody, try to be more grownup and not like a teenager. When I was in the hospital I just kept thinking, ‘I need to be home. I need to be there for my mom.’”

She’s trying to eat better too. When she got home, she ate a lot of junk food—another attempt at distraction. Tiffany worries what might happen now that she’s cooped up inside all day.

“I’ve gained so much weight. When they put me on the scale at the doctor’s office the other day, I was shocked. I was 129, and now I’m 148. I gained 20 pounds in two weeks. The doctor just says to take it easy, slow down. But he doesn’t know what’s going on with the house.”

She’d like to walk more for exercise, but she’s terrified of leaving the house alone. A beauty supply store two blocks away is the farthest she’ll go by herself. “I’m worried that I’ll start having all those thoughts, and I won’t be near help,” she says.

At the end of March Tiffany received a summons to appear at truancy court on April 9. That week she began having painful cramps in her legs. She could barely get out of bed. “It felt like a claw gripping at my legs and scratching my bones,” she recalls.

Maritza took her to the emergency room and learned that one of her medications, a steroid called Prednisone, was causing a loss of bone density in her legs. Tiffany was taken off Prednisone and prescribed a calcium supplement, and the pain gradually went away. She showed up the next day in truancy court on crutches.

“Because of the financial state of most of our students’ families, our students are among the most mobile in the country. By and large, these are not kids who come from property-owning families. Most don’t have parents who are married. They start out the year living with their father, and end the year living across the city with their mother. Every six months they have completely different phone numbers. Their home life is highly transient. They may not be moving across the country, but they are moving within the city four or five times a year.”

Ward says there’s no way to track how many of the Philadelphia School District’s students are experiencing poor performance or missing school because of a foreclosure crisis at home. She says schools in North Philadelphia, like Tiffany’s, may experience a greater percentage of students affected by foreclosure, thanks to a higher rate of home ownership in that area. But there’s still no reliable way to judge its effect.

“It would be different if home ownership were the norm and suddenly it’s not,” says Ward. “The major topics that come up are more like, ‘My mother’s on drugs. My father’s in jail.’ This isn’t something a school nurse or counselor would be watching out for. They’re still trying to meet very, very basic needs.”

Philadelphia hasn’t been hit as hard as, say, Stockton, Calif., where one in every 27 households was foreclosed in 2007. That’s the top spot on a list of foreclosure rates for 100 metro areas compiled by RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties. Philadelphia was 67th on that list, well below “scare cities” like Cleveland, Detroit and Oakland, Calif.

But in 2003 Pennsylvania had the fourth-highest rate of foreclosure among subprime loans in the country, and subprime loans were approved in growing numbers over the next three years. In 2006, 37 percent of all mortgage loans made in Pennsylvania were subprime, up from 9.9 percent in 2002.

According to the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, there are 10 Philadelphia neighborhoods where a full 50 percent of all mortgage loans made in 2005 were subprime. The Rodriguez family’s old neighborhood, Hunting Park, is one, along with Kingsessing, West Oak Lane and Southwest.

As far as Tiffany knows, none of her school friends is going through foreclosure. Then again, she’s never brought it up to friends, teachers or the school nurse, so she can’t say for sure. “It just felt awkward to talk about it, so I didn’t,” she says. “I don’t like to tell my business at school.”

At her appearance in truancy court April 9, Tiffany was ordered to receive home schooling. Her school nurse had written a note for the judge explaining that environmental irritants in the air at Dobbins had worsened her asthma, causing Tiffany’s absence. Dobbins is unaware of the financial crisis at home; Maritza hasn’t informed anyone there of the situation.

Tiffany affirmed the nurse’s version of events to the judge, but says the real reason behind her asthma attacks was the fear of losing the house. “All of the attacks happened when I was at home,” she says, “while I was thinking about the house.” And the first one occurred soon after she learned about the foreclosure in December, though she’s been attending Dobbins since September.

A 2006 study published in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences confirms a link between stress at home and asthma in children. “In children and adolescents with asthma, the quality of home life and family relationships are important determinants of health and well-being,” it reported.

The school district later denied Tiffany a home-school instructor, explaining that asthma isn’t on its list of conditions that would necessitate home schooling. Maritza is now trying to enroll her in summer school. Tiffany knows she may have to repeat ninth grade in the fall, and that hurts her pride. “I’ve never repeated a grade in my life,” she says. “I don’t think it’s fair. It’s not like I wasn’t going to school on purpose.”

In the meantime, she’s lost a year of life to the fear of foreclosure. “I miss doing geometry equations so bad, it’s like physical,” she says.

Tiffany and her mom went to her school together at the end of April to return her textbooks. It was her first time back in six weeks. “I saw all my old friends and my teachers, and it really hurt. They were all like, ‘We miss you. When are you coming back?’ And I had to be like, ‘I can’t come back right now.’”

But on April 21 a package from Washington Mutual arrived at the house. Inside was a document that every foreclosed homeowner dreams of seeing—a loan modification agreement. Washington Mutual had agreed to convert Maritza’s loan from an adjustable-rate mortgage to a fixed loan at 5 percent until 2033. The foreclosure was averted.

Maritza now owes $64,871, which is $8,000 more than she originally purchased the house for in 2004. The difference comes largely from Washington Mutual’s fees. But Maritza doesn’t care. “I’m not losing my house. I’m mad ’cause they didn’t just let me pay the money I owed and skip all of this stress. But I’m not losing my house.”

Tiffany knew nothing about the loan-modification agreement when asked about it a few days later. She knew the house was out of danger, but she was clueless about the details. “After I got home from the hospital the last time, I decided I really don’t want to know anything about the house anymore,” she says.

“I guess I’m trying to be a kid again, on purpose. I don’t want to get worked up about it. Just leave it in God’s hands, and in my mom’s hands. I believe in her.”

Since then, Tiffany says, she hasn’t felt any of the symptoms that triggered her attacks. In the last couple weeks she’s been getting out of the house too. “I’ve been going to the movies and to the Franklin Mills Mall with my girlfriends. They’re real glad to see me out again. The other night they came over and we were in my room dancing to Spanish music, salsa and merengue, for exercise. It just felt good to get up and move.”