How so? Common sense, said Martin Eakes, co-founder and CEO of Self-Help, a Main Street nonprofit organization that has, according to its Web site, provided $5.24 billion to 60,130 homeowners, small businesses and nonprofit enterprises since starting the practice in 1984.

Self-Help is still buying, rebuilding, selling and lending for and to just the sort of people in places that are caught up in the subprime lending mess. Yet with much of the country's banking, development and real estate industries in crisis, "financially, we're doing fine," Eakes said in an interview last week.

Not that he doesn't keep his fingers crossed.

"So far, our borrowers are doing pretty well, but I'm anxious for them a little bit," he said. But "I'm depressed for those communities we have helped to build up."

One of those communities is Southside, an impoverished neighborhood between Roxboro Street and the American Tobacco Trail, just south of the Durham Freeway.

According to a February report by the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, Southside had 11 foreclosures in the first 10 months of 2007. Earlier this year, neighborhood resident and organizer Ray Eurquhart said he counted 135 houses there for sale, for rent, boarded up or otherwise vacant.

Self-Help has bought more than 30 properties in Southside, among them a duplex at South and Enterprise streets that has been remodeled for a community center.

Self-Help bought the house in October 2006 for $35,000. Its tax value now is almost $92,000. More important for the neighborhood, the center is catty-corner to a convenience store that neighbors say is a source of concern. Another house at the corner is about to get a Self-Help rehab job.

"Helps keep those thugs from hanging on the sidewalk," Eurquhart said.

Branching out

In Charlotte, Self-Help plans to buy property in the blighted, foreclosure-hit Peachtree subdivision for a lease-purchase program.

Neighborhoods such as Southside and Peachtree are struggling to survive, said Evan Covington Chavez, Self-Help's real estate development director. Foreclosures drag a community down as vacant houses are vandalized, become drug hangouts or deteriorate because of neglect.

"We're keeping the lights on and the grass cut," Covington Chavez said. "We have one focus, and that is to get the neighborhood stabilized."

Solid neighborhoods stabilize property values, and that helps the owners build wealth, which is Self-Help's essential purpose.

"Charlotte is a test case for us," Eakes said. "Find vacant properties, and put into them families with weak credit, and let them rent for three to five years." As the tenants demonstrate that they are credit-worthy and have the income to keep up mortgage payments, they can buy.

"Our little efforts won't turn this around," said Eakes, "but it may help pilot something that can be applied on a bigger scale."

How it all began

Eakes and his wife, Bonnie Wright, founded the Center for Community Self-Help in 1980. At first, it offered legal and financial advice. In 1984, it changed to lending money. Eakes has operated from the trunk of his car; now he operates from a high-rise at 301 W. Main St., has seven other offices in North Carolina and does business all over the United States.

Self-Help has a credit union, a ventures fund and a research branch, the Center for Responsible Lending, which said in 2006 that 2 million Americans were in danger of losing their homes in a subprime-loan catastrophe.

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