The screen door banging in the night on the vacant house next door startled Shelia Cranford at first.

She'd get out of bed, walk over to the bathroom and peek at the house through her window blinds. Was someone breaking in? Trying to steal copper or use the house as a drug haven? She'd sigh with relief when she saw it was just the wind whacking the aluminum door against the frame.

For more than six months now, the house in north Minneapolis' Jordan neighborhood has stood empty, Cranford said. A previous owner failed to keep up with mortgage payments and the bank bought it at a sheriff's sale in 2005. Its latest owner, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is trying to unload it for $72,000.

And the banging door brings the national epidemic of home foreclosures into Cranford's bedroom.

In north Minneapolis, the epicenter of foreclosures in the Twin Cities, 1,400 houses have been sold at foreclosure auctions in the past 16 months alone. On the block of Logan Avenue N. where Cranford lives, 12 of the 27 houses have been in various stages of foreclosure since mid-2005.

For many of those homes, it was a story not of poor homeowners unable to afford their houses, but of shoestring landlords whose investments turned bad.

That doesn't make it any easier for those like Cranford, trying to make a life in a tough neighborhood. Houses around her empty out. Some get boarded up. Criminals have more room to work.

Besides the vacant two-story beige-and-rose-colored house next to Cranford on the 3000 and 3100 block of Logan, there is one down the block with grass growing wildly, one across the street with broken windows, another with foreclosure court papers taped to it. Another house, damaged in a fire, is boarded up. Six have "For Sale" signs.

"It does make the neighborhood look not just desolate, but kind of unclean," Cranford said. "Like it's dying."

Trusting in Logan

Despite the North Side's long-struggling reputation, Cranford bet her American Dream on Logan nearly 14 years ago.

She found a sturdy white stucco house for less than $60,000. It had dark-stained Craftsman-style woodwork and a back yard full of grass. There were families with young children on the street and it seemed like a good place to finish raising her three adolescent daughters.

And it was, for most of the years since then, she said. But lately she's watched the neighborhood deteriorate. Families around her started to leave, and more landlords started snatching up the housing stock.

Some of the landlords didn't keep up the properties and drove away good tenants. Some tenants tore homes apart. The street started to feel unsafe.

The house next door was purchased by a man in his 20s and his lack of experience in real estate showed, Cranford said. He had good tenants at first, she said, but then he got behind on some things and those tenants got fed up. The renters who replaced them were younger and louder and attracted crowds for parties.

Now that the house is empty, it is more peaceful. But Cranford worries about what lies ahead for the century-old house and the street around it.

Empty hopes

Cranford took a rare walk on her block one recent sunny morning. She and her neighbors used to sit on their lawns all the time, but she's afraid to venture out much nowadays.

"I go out there when I can to sweep up my grounds and stuff like that," she said. "That's about it."

She strolled down a sidewalk lined with giant trees sprawling over the pavement and houses built mostly in the early part of the last century.

"They're not bad homes, you know. They just need to be kept up," Cranford said.

An empty house on the corner -- a small one-story beige-sided structure with brown trim -- had grass growing wild and an empty potato-chip bag and condom wrapper on the steps.

Cranford walked up the street and stopped in front of 3106, a grand, two-story white house with gray trim and stained glass in a front window.

It stands empty, too. One window is broken. A screen is detached and twisted on another.