Caribbean immigrants may be losing substantial amounts of highly valuable property which they inherited from their grandparents in Brooklyn and elsewhere in New York City.

And they are losing the real estate partly because of the foreclosure crisis that is sweeping the United States. Another reason is their failure to manage efficiently the homes their parents and grandparents left for them.

That disturbing trend was identified by U.S. Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, a Democrat of Brooklyn, who now occupies a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that was once held by the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, a Caribbean-New Yorker, the first Black woman elected to Congress.

Clarke singled out Barbadians as an example of what she was talking about.

“Many of you know someone whose parents came and invested their money from their hard-earned seat after coming from Barbados,” she told representatives of Barbadian organizations in the City. “Now, the grandchildren can’t manage the properties. Barbadians were some of the first landowners in some of the communities that we reside in today, and the children are in foreclosure.”

That was why the plethora of Caribbean groups, professional bodies, fraternal institutions, alumni associations and sports clubs that dot the city’s immigrant landscape must play a key role in providing financial and real estate management information to help people save their homes from the foreclosure axe.

As the Congresswoman saw it, the various associations must carve out a specific task that enables them to reach and assist property owners in holding on to their homes, some of which are in the $1 million range, in Bedford Stuyvesant, Fort Greene, East Flatbush and other parts of Brooklyn.

Executives in the real estate business say many of the West Indians who inherited substantial properties were taking out large home equity loans and spending the money on consumer durables, and when escalator clause in adjustable rates send monthly payments through the roof, many of the property owners can’t pay up. Hence, foreclosure.

In addition, many of them were said to be selling their properties often at below market prices to youthful white American families who are moving back into the neighborhoods that their parents once fled, to get away from living among West Indians. Now, the reverse is taking place. They are buying back the homes, spurring gentrification of communities that were once solidly Black.

Historians who have studied Caribbean migration to the city in the early to mid 1900s, pinpoint West Indians as some of the most industrious and hardworking immigrants, who put a high premium on property ownership. They were said to be among the first to integrate and acquire brownstones in previously all-white communities in Brooklyn, a move that spurred white flight to the suburbs and to Queens.

Those acquisitions and the values and lifestyles that the immigrants embraced were captured in literature. For instance, Paula Marshall, the daughter of West Indian immigrants, wrote what has become a classic in American literature, Brown Girl, Brownstones, which told the story of Caribbean women in Brooklyn holding their families together, by clinging to the cultural norms they brought from their homeland.

It’s some of those same brownstone houses which may be in foreclosure today put there by the grandchildren of the early immigrants.

Clarke was invited by Jessica Odle, Barbados’ consul general in New York, to address the members of the organizations at their annual meeting to chart a course for 2008.

“We were very fortunate to get Congresswoman Clarke to agree to come to speak to us,” said Odle.

The federal elected official said that the current generation of West Indians in the city mustn’t simply believe in the exercise of political power but in “economic empowerment” as well.

“What roles can the organizations play in examining the rules of the game, landownership in America,” she asked. “That is where the power base comes from.”

What was ironic about the situation facing West Indians, she said, was that Barbadians, Jamaicans, Guyanese, Antiguans and others were among the highest wage earners in the city.

“Collectively, our income supersedes that of every other ethnic group out there,” Clarke insisted. “Studies have shown that Caribbean Americans who enter the workplace make much more per capita than any other immigrant group that comes to the United States. That fact you need to know and to be proud of.” After the presentation and the question and answer session, Clarke presented Odle with a Congressional proclamation hailing her for her work in the city in the past four years.

“You have made us proud,” the Congresswoman told Odle.