Omar Samuel Orozco does tile work on a home in the 2500 block of N. 46th St., part of Common Ground’s house rehabilitation program. Credit: Michael Sears

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Theresa Utschig remembers the house at 2528 N. 48th St. as a bit of a nightmare.

It was a foreclosure and was vacant. The roof leaked, badly. You could see the water running into the kitchen.

Scavengers had busted out the back door and punched holes in the walls to strip out copper, pipes, electrical fixtures and anything else that might have scrap value. Some rooms were heaped with garbage.

"It was dangerous to walk in," Utschig said.

Not anymore.

It's a bright, lovely bungalow, with its built-in cabinets, coved ceilings, leaded glass windows and a black granite countertop in the once-leaky kitchen.

It's also one of the first houses to be offered for sale under what community group Southeastern Wisconsin Common Ground hopes will be a self-sustaining program to help address the foreclosure crisis — about 2,600 houses are in either city- or bank-owned foreclosures — that has plagued some Milwaukee neighborhoods.

A few years ago, Common Ground, where Utschig is a volunteer, got more than $2 million in federal money to acquire foreclosed houses in the Sherman Park neighborhood, rehab and sell them. So far, the group has sold 30 homes and is working on more than 20 more.

But when the government money ran out more than a year ago, Common Ground acted to keep the effort going. It formed an entity called Milwaukee Rising, which has received more than $800,000 from private organizations, most of it from Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank. The group is using the money in a revolving loan pool to continue the rehabbing.

On Saturday, the group held an open house to show an early result of that work, the bungalow on N. 48th.

"This house is beautiful," Ald. Russell Stamper II, who lives just a few blocks away, said to a gathering of about 30 people before the home — asking price, $112,900 — was opened for inspection. "It's going to make me go home and paint my porch. I'm the alderman. I've got to make sure I can keep up with Common Ground."

Common Ground representatives have traveled to Germany and California to press deed-holding banks to address the foreclosure crisis, and the efforts seem to have paid off. Banks have given foreclosed homes to the group. That lets Common Ground concentrate its limited money on rehab.

Randy Jones vouches for the quality of the work. Athletic director at a Milwaukee Boys & Girls Clubs, Jones, 47, bought a Common Ground-restored house more than two years ago.

"Love it," he said of his home, near N. 51st and W. Chambers streets. "I didn't have to do anything to it."

It's Jones' first house, and he was a welcome addition to the neighborhood; before his purchase, the building had been abandoned for two years.

"When they take houses like this and make them livable, make you have pride in them, they get people together," Jones said. "It changes people's whole dynamic of just being a human being. It helps values. When you live low, you act low."

House by house, Common Ground wants to work on that — an effort that drew praise Saturday from both Stamper and Common Council President Michael Murphy.

"Too many problems in our city occur when people are so apathetic they walk away and don't choose to take action because they think it's too big a problem they can't make a difference," Murphy said. "Every long journey begins with a first step, and that's what Common Ground is all about."