From the CPB Ombudsman

On a rainy July evening, I am perched on a stool in the control room of WYSO, an NPR station with a 52-year history in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A staff of nine operates from the lower level of a building on the campus of Antioch University, a college that closed its doors two years ago and is struggling to re-open.

Across the room is station manager Neenah Ellis, a twenty-year veteran of NPR in Washington, who took over WYSO last February. Ellis is preparing to manage the phones for a 7:00 p.m. call-in show, the last of three in a project called “My Home: Facing the Mortgage Crisis,” a programming initiative that has WYSO collaborating with ThinkTV in nearby Dayton and the Dayton Daily News.

In the studio is the evening’s moderator, Emily McCord, a reporter and local host of All Things Considered, who has recently returned from NPR’s Economic Training Project in Culver City, California. Joining McCord to answer the phone calls they hope will come are three expert guests. Beth Deutscher is executive director of the Home Ownership Center of Greater Dayton. Professor Richard Stock is Director of the Business Research Group at the University of Dayton. Willis Blackshear is the Montgomery County Recorder.

WYSO serves the portion of west-central Ohio that includes Yellow Springs, Dayton and Springfield, an area designated by the Treasury Department as among those critically affected by the mortgage crisis. When Willis Blackshear took over duties as director of the office where all mortgages in the county are registered, he discovered that Dayton ranked #2 in the state of Ohio in foreclosures.

Since then, plagued by plant closings, rising unemployment and mortgage failures, the recession has tightened its grip on this part of Ohio. “We’re looking at 2013 for this to clear up,” says Willis Blackshear.

Richard Stock, who studies the impact on commercial as well as residential lending adds, “The rate of foreclosures is now 10-times as great as the early 1990′s. Three more years is a frightening thought.”

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Let’s roll back the tape for a moment. For personal reasons I found myself spending several weeks this summer in Yellow Springs, getting my daily dose of NPR from WYSO. Hearing from the local experts who gather in the coffee shops of this village and listening to the station promos for the upcoming series, “Facing the Mortgage Crisis,” I decided I wanted a little more background, so I asked Neenah Ellis if I could come by for a visit.

“This is our Katrina,” Ellis told me. The problem is larger in this area than elsewhere and larger than generally perceived, she explained, also difficult for both the public and the people trapped in it to understand. To cover the story properly WYOS needed to find a way to immerse the staff and the station in the problem. The solution came in a grant from CPB.

In the summer of 2008, CPB made a pilot grant to cover the mortgage crisis to KETC in St. Louis. “They retooled the station to make themselves more community-centric, created a package of “lessons learned” and put it online,” says Lynda Clarke, CPB’s overall project manager.

In an effort to make the project national, CPB then looked at U.S. Treasury Department reports on top foreclosure markets in the country and developed a grants program. “We sent out a limited request for proposals (RPF),” explains Clarke. “You’re in a market we want to cover, we said, and we urged stations to collaborate with other media to extend their reach.”

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