Fighting for scrap

Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes - a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

"They cut it here and then pulled it right out of the wall," real estate broker Marc Charney says, pointing to broken plaster near a wrecked baseboard heating system in the 2,774-sq-ft home in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class city of 94,304 people.

Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas.

In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

"We're in an incredibly unfortunate time where the nonferrous metals commodities market for scrap is at an all-time high. Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process," Cleveland city councilor Tony Brancatelli says.

"We're seeing houses sold for $100 that are distressed houses that should not be recycled," he says. Some boarded-up homes in his Slavic Village community have "No copper, only PVC" painted on the boards to stop would-be thieves.

In Brockton, which suffered 400 foreclosures last year, blamed largely on predatory lending, and which is bracing for another 400 this year, Charney says the thieves inflicted about $15,000 of damage on the home on Vine Street.

"I had this property under agreement. We negotiated. The offer was accepted. The buyer came back to the property three weeks later only to find they had gotten in and stolen the copper, so we had to go back to the bank and renegotiate," says Charney, president of CharneyRealEstate.com.

After haggling, the bank shaved $5,000 off the $105,000 price.

"The problem is there's almost no security. Does this look like anybody lives here?" he says, gesturing to the boarded-up home with chipped yellow paint and a "notice of foreclosure" letter affixed to its door.

"It's like a big billboard saying 'come and take me,'" he adds. "It's an epidemic."

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