5 Years Later In Logan: Still No Way Out The Owners Of 167 Collapsing Homes Have Been Resettled. But That's No Consolation To The Many Left Behind. "All You Keep Hearing Is Promises," Says One Homeowner.

Street life in Logan is disconcertingly normal.

A burly man carrying a gigantic powder-blue stuffed bear walks buoyantly behind a woman loaded down with groceries.

Young men stand on the street corners, children play outside and old people greet one another warmly, with caring questions.

But the backdrop for this scene is eerily askew.

Rows of vacant, sinking houses with broken windows and boarded doors line most blocks. And the hulking remains of cracked and splintered porch roofs have collapsed into one another at angles, like folds of an accordion.

"And they don't even tear them down - that's what I'm raising hell about," said Lelia Pompey, who lives in one of eight houses still occupied in the 4700 block of Warnock Street, once home to 49 families.

For 2 1/2 years, Pompey tried in vain to have the abandoned house next to hers secured by the city. Through the common wall - cracked and unstable from the subsidence that's killing the neighborhood - Pompey, her husband and their three children could hear vagrants who had moved into the house.

Despite complaints, no action was taken, Pompey said; each city agency she talked to said another was responsible for securing the vacant house.

Finally on Feb. 6 the Pompeys' fears came true. Pompey and her children were out grocery shopping for a little more than an hour. They returned to find their home ransacked and robbed. Part of the common wall had been knocked out from next door, leaving the front room of the Pompey house with a gaping hole "big enough to walk through," she said.

Such is life in Logan, where squatters brazenly take over abandoned houses. Where leaking roofs and sewage in basements are commonplace. Where residents of hundreds of sinking homes - in a 17-square-block neighborhood built atop a pile of cinder and ash 70 years ago - hold on, almost hopelessly, with the knowledge that they must leave but without the means to do so.

The Pompeys were all the more frustrated because the house they wanted secured belongs to the Logan Assistance Corp. (LAC), the very agency that is supposed to make the lives of people in Logan better. The agency was established by the city in 1987 to buy out and help relocate residents of the community, bounded by Roosevelt Boulevard and Loudon, Wingohocking and 11th Streets.