Every few weeks, Alvin Chandra cleans up the garbage that has accumulated in the vacant lot next to his granite fabrication plant on Adeline Street in West Oakland — soiled mattresses, worn-out sofa beds and piles of used fast food containers.
“We’re constantly painting over the graffiti on our wall,” said Mr. Chandra, 47, pointing to the long flat exterior of his building that abuts the vacant lot. “It’s hard to make a good impression on clients when there’s a pile of trash in front of your building.”
The trash-strewn lot is owned by Fannie Mae. The government-controlled mortgage company acquired the property after a foreclosure on the previous owner last June. With the housing bust and continued recession, Fannie Mae, and its counterpart Freddie Mac, have quietly become major residential landowners in the Bay Area’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.
According to data from Foreclosure Radar.com, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now own 2,323 properties in the Bay Area worth an estimated $511 million. Like the vacant lot on Adeline Street, many are blighted, covered in trash, with overgrown lawns, junk cars, chipped paint and broken windows.
In Oakland, where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own 371 properties with an estimated value of $70 million, city officials inspected 142 homes and apartment buildings owned by the companies last year and found that nearly half of them violated the city’s blight ordinance. The two firms were fined $123,300 after they failed to fix problems quickly at nine of the properties.
Andrew Wilson, a spokesman for Fannie Mae in Washington, said the fact that most violations were quickly resolved after being identified by city officials showed “we are absolutely committed to stabilizing neighborhoods.”
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