On most days, Anjad Brijlall tends his garden and small lawn outside his tidy Ozone Park home twice a day.
But the beauty of Brijlall's garden stands in stark contrast with the seediness of the vacant, foreclosed home across the street where refuse mingles with knee-high weeds.
"Nobody has been living there for about six months," Brijlall, a 72-year-old retiree, said of the eyesore, now owned by a large bank. "I'd be glad to see a good neighbor buy it and keep it nice and clean."
With southeastern Queens emerging as the epicenter of the city's subprime mortgage crisis, City Councilman Joseph Addabbo is drawing attention to a stalled bill that would help rid blocks like Brijlall's of such blight.
Addabbo, who is trying to unseat veteran GOP state Sen. Serphin Maltese (R-Glendale), blasted the Senate's Republican leadership yesterday for failing to pass a bill that would allow the city to clean up foreclosed homes and bill the banks that now own them.
"As the foreclosure crisis spreads, we're seeing a ripple effect as property values plummet and surrounding neighborhoods experience an increase in quality-of-life issues like graffiti and crime," Addabbo (D-Howard Beach) said outside another vacant Ozone Park home facing foreclosure.
But Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, noted that the Legislature, after negotiations with Gov. Paterson, passed a compromise bill in June. That legislation required banks to give lenders 90 days' notice before filing for foreclosure.
"This new law prevents people from losing their homes in the first place," Reif said.
But Addabbo released a report yesterday showing that Queens has 9,297 homes in the foreclosure process - roughly a third of all such filings in the city.
The report was based on foreclosure data from real estate Web sites and information from the Center for Responsible Lending, which tracks the impact of foreclosures on property values.
It found that foreclosures have devalued 411,929 homes in Queens at a cost of more than $12 billion.
The 15th Senate District, which runs from Maspeth south to Howard Beach, has 14% of all bank-owned homes in the borough.
Maltese's spokeswoman, Kristin Lord, defended the Senate's response to the mortgage meltdown.
"The Senate has been dealing with the subprime mortgage crisis long before Joe Addabbo got involved," she said. "We are trying to keep people in their homes."jlauinger@nydailynews.com
