MAYOR Douglas Palmer, meeting visitors at Trenton's City Hall, points to a large map peppered with dark dots.
Each one represents a home or group of homes empty because they are on the verge of foreclosure, or repossession, and there are dozens all over the city.
The dots represent only those properties that the sheriff's department of surrounding Mercer
county has identified as being at risk. Many more they don't even know about, Mr Palmer said.
In this New Jersey city, the US subprime mortgage crisis is biting deep.
"Some people are even afraid to talk about it," the mayor said of homeowners facing soaring mortgage payments. "Half of them don't even call their lender when they run into problems."
The challenge, said Mr Palmer, is to prevent more homes from ending up as dots on the map, but the resources at his disposal are limited.
The site of a pivotal battle in the American Revolutionary War, the port city more recently has struggled with drugs, violent crime, joblessness and other urban blight.
The latest crisis threatens to derail years of revitalisation under Mr Palmer, a four-term incumbent and the first black mayor in a predominantly black city of 85,000 people.
Like many US cities, it has seen foreclosures – a legal act which strips owners of the right to property – surge as people who bought homes in a property boom in the last few years face mortgage payments that have reset to higher rates they cannot afford.
More than 600 properties went into foreclosure or came under threat of imminent foreclosure last year, up from 421 in 2006, according to the mayor's office, collating data from a number of sources. Those numbers are set to grow this year. As of December, the sheriff's office had identified 260 properties in danger.
It is not just Trenton that Mr Palmer is concerned about. Foreclosure has become a top priority for the US Conference of Mayors, of which he is president and which meets in Washington next week.
Mr Palmer and other mayors say a mortgage relief plan brokered by President George Bush's administration does not help the many already well into the process of losing their homes.
"The federal government response has been anaemic," said Mayor John DeStefano of New Haven, Connecticut, where foreclosures rose 80 per cent in 2007. "Mayors are talking to each other about this," Mr DeStefano said. "No-one else is going to help these homeowners."
Thomas Cochran, the executive director of the mayors' group said foreclosures could become a defining issue for urban leaders, in the same way the Aids epidemic did in the 1980s, which cities were forced to tackle early on when they saw insufficient federal response.
In Trenton, Mr Palmer has focused for years on creating affordable housing for middle-income people, including a collection of attractive terraced houses in a once-downtrodden area known as the Battle Monument district.
The mayor fears that even neighbourhoods like this one, where mortgages are mostly strong, will suffer as foreclosures rise, homes are shuttered, crime festers and property values fall. Police have reported a rise in copper pipe thefts around the city as vandals strip unoccupied homes, Mr Palmer said.
"This cuts across every area of our economy, of the services we'll have to provide," Mr Palmer said. "When homes are boarded up, neighbours complain of blight such as piles of trash and overgrown grass. Who's going to cut it? The city will have to."
Some mayors are aiming squarely at mortgage companies. The city of Baltimore has sued Wells Fargo & Co, accusing the lender of preying on minorities. The company denies the allegations.
Elsewhere, cities such as Cleveland and Buffalo, New York, are trying to hold lenders responsible for the maintenance of homes in foreclosure. Cleveland has sued companies including Wells Fargo and Merrill Lynch, seeking to recover hundreds of millions of dollars for lost property tax revenue and the clean-up of abandoned houses.
"For some cities, this is going to be a crisis," said John Vogel, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, who studies property sales.
Mayor Palmer is hopeful there are local solutions that other cities could adopt.
One idea is for community development organisations to buy homes in foreclosure and lease them to the former owners while helping them prepare to repurchase them, something already being done on a small scale in his area.
CRITICS DOUBT CLAIMS OF IMPROVEMENTTHE number of new foreclosures in the United States in the third quarter of 2006 was 60 per cent higher than the number of borrowers the industry was able to help, a trade group said yesterday.
Nevertheless, the Mortgage Bankers Association said its analysis shows banks are working hard to reach strapped borrowers to set up loan modifications and repayment plans.
Making matters difficult, the group said, is a high proportion of homes owned by speculators and situations in which borrowers didn't respond to repeated attempts to contact them.
The trade group, which conducted a survey of companies that collect payments for more than 60 per cent of outstanding US home loans, said mortgage lenders started 237,000 loan modifications and repayment plans nationwide in the third quarter, compared with 384,000 new foreclosures.
"The industry is doing a good job, and I think we're going to see these numbers grow," said Jay Brinkmann, the vice-president of research and economics for the industry group.
Among the foreclosures, 63 per cent involved cases in which borrowers had already defaulted on a previous loan workout plan, failed to respond to efforts to contact them or didn't live in the home, the industry survey found.
However, consumer advocates in the US have been sceptical of the industry's efforts.
Kathleen Day, a spokeswoman for the non-profit Centre for Responsible Lending, said the mortgage bankers group consistently "paints a much rosier picture than has proved to be the case."
The mortgage industry came under fire from consumer groups, politicians and regulators last Autumn after a survey by Moody's Investors Service in August showed that lenders modified only one per cent of subprime loans to people with poor credit records.
A follow-up survey by Moody's found in September that 3.5 per cent of loans that reset to higher levels in the first eight months of 2007 had been modified.
Foreclosure prevention is a top priority for politicians, as 1.8 million subprime mortgages made to American borrowers with poor credit are scheduled to reset to higher rates this year and next.
