BALTIMORE — When Wilbert and Patricia Savage missed two mortgage payments on their tidy row house here last fall, Mr. Savage, 75, despaired that they could ever catch up.

But he remembered Roy Miller, a nonprofit housing counselor with a nearby storefront office who had helped other neighbors in trouble. The Savages visited Mr. Miller, and he called their lender and was able to work out a repayment plan for the missed payments, something Mr. Savage said he could never have managed on his own.

“Without Roy, we’d probably be out of the house or close to it,” he said.

As home foreclosure rates rise around the country, they appear to have stabilized or dropped in one neighborhood here, Belair-Edison, providing a model that local housing officials say can be copied in other areas.

For much of the decade, Belair-Edison, a lower- and middle-income neighborhood on the edge of East Baltimore, has had one of the city’s highest foreclosure rates. From 1993 to 2003, one in three homeowners in the neighborhood lost their homes.

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