Counselors and attorneys at St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center, Baltimore's largest nonprofit foreclosure-prevention team, can take on about 1,900 troubled borrowers a year - a weighty load of nearly 200 cases each.

But more than 150,000 Maryland homeowners are behind on their mortgages.

Even now - three years into the foreclosure wave and despite multibillion-dollar bailouts - the team of nine employees and one volunteer at St. Ambrose aren't seeing the crisis abate. Instead, from their offices in a converted red-brick rowhouse in Barclay, a neighborhood with scores of abandoned homes, they see a never-ending stream of clients.

Anxious, depressed and stressed clients.

And that stress is catching.

The housing collapse's toll hasn't just been on over-leveraged homeowners and lenders. It's also felt by housing counselors stationed on the front lines.

St. Ambrose employees are feeling the pressure that comes with work that's more mission than job, work that's often frustrating and heart-breaking. They are negotiating with banks and mortgage servicers to get their clients' homes off the path to the auction block - to save the biggest financial investment many will ever make. Slow and contradictory responses mean cases routinely drag on for months.

Emotions run so high that Anne Balcer Norton, director of foreclosure prevention at St. Ambrose, has considered installing panic buttons in rooms where staffers meet with clients.

Getting a mortgage during the housing bubble was easier than easy, but getting it modified now to avoid foreclosure is often fiendishly difficult. Across the country, housing counselors are trying to help borrowers navigate a process that seems to change on a daily basis - to collect the documents lenders want to see and to follow up, and follow up, and follow up again with the servicer handling the loan until someone makes a decision.

President Barack Obama's Home Affordable Modification Program has $35 billion earmarked to streamline the process of lowering monthly payments for qualified homeowners. But about a year after the program launched, most U.S. borrowers the government believes are eligible for a HAMP loan modification haven't received one even on a trial basis. Just 5 percent had loans permanently modified. Meanwhile, more cases keep coming as joblessness worsens. Out-of-work borrowers have little money to make even a reduced mortgage payment.

"I naively came into this position without fully appreciating how big this crisis would become," said Norton, head of the operation since fall 2007, soon after foreclosures began worsening. "It's now a pandemic."

She wants her charges to have stress-management training, and she broached the subject when they gathered around a battered table for a staff meeting that marked the start of a recent workday at St. Ambrose. Did they have problems setting boundaries with clients expecting miracles? she asked.

"No, I think it's more how not to take it home with you," said Cara Stretch, 31, a counselor who joined St. Ambrose at the end of 2007 after working for a lender.

This is Stretch's dream job, doing what she can to make a difference in people's lives. But the collective distress of her clients is a powerful force. When a client faced an auction date in January, the December holiday season filled Stretch with anxiety. She decided to keep working the case while she was ostensibly on vacation.

With often-overwhelmed loan servicers, getting approved for a loan modification - or even definitely rejected - can be a test of fortitude.

Bryan Sheldon, a St. Ambrose counselor, submitted documentation for one Baltimore homeowner and was told she would qualify for a modification. But several months later, still no written confirmation. Was she going to be approved or not? Sheldon, a 24-year-old with shaggy brown hair, dialed the company on speaker phone to find out.

"Thank you for calling Bank of America home retention division," said a cheerful recorded voice. "We are here to help! Please be advised we are a debt collector."

A bank employee named Angela picked up the call and said the loan was being reviewed to determine eligibility for HAMP. "I don't show any decisions have been made," she said. "The normal period is 90 days, but it can be longer."

Sheldon asked who would handle the modification, pointing out that two negotiators had already been assigned and later reassigned.

No one at the moment, Angela said.

Sheldon asked about the foreclosure proceedings.

"Currently, the property is in foreclosure with no sale date," Angela answered.

"Of course, one can be assigned at any time," she added.

Sheldon sighed and moved on. He tried to return a rare message from a loan-modification employee, another Bank of America staffer, but the person wasn't there, and he was transferred to someone else. Next he tried Chase to find out why a client who was approved for a loan modification had yet to receive the paperwork confirming it.

"All agents are busy at this time," a recorded voice on Chase's line said. Perky elevator music played before the voice returned, asking callers to leave a message. Sheldon hung up, tried again, got the same result and made a note to try again later.

"If you leave a message, you're not going to get called back," he said from experience.

Sheldon then took a stab at resolving a long-running case, one that started with another counselor in August 2008. Last year, Litton Loan Servicing told the Baltimore borrower that she didn't qualify for HAMP and sent her to the division handling other loan modifications. Then in November, the division declared her eligible for HAMP - which meant she had to start all over again to get approved.

To restart the process, Sheldon said, he faxed 21 pages of required documents and was told most of it didn't come through. Then representatives said they couldn't talk to him at all. They wanted to see an authorization form signed by the borrower that gives St. Ambrose the right to negotiate on her behalf - a form Sheldon said he had supplied several times. He faxed it again in December.

A day later, a Litton representative was telling him it wasn't in the file. He asked her to see if the other forms were there.

"I see an authorization we received, and it was signed June 2009 - I see that one," the representative said. "But that one expired. We only honor authorizations for 90 days."

"Look at our authorization letter the client signs," Sheldon urged, noting that it states it's in force until the client revokes it.

"I agree to that point, but we only honor authorizations for 90 days," the Litton employee said. "Sorry."

"If the review process is taking more than 90 days, how can you only accept authorizations for that long?" Sheldon asked out loud - after he hung up.

Contacted later by The Baltimore Sun, Litton spokeswoman Donna Marie Jendritza said the policy is for homeowners' protection, in case they reconsider having someone else handle their case.

"We take a really conservative approach when ... customers work with third parties, whether it be a counseling agency or maybe they're having a friend helping them out," she said. "A 90-day window is typically enough time for us to work through a package, if we have all the information."

An official with Chase, whose agents were all busy when Sheldon called that day, said the company has nearly doubled the number of employees talking to struggling homeowners since the end of 2008. "We have almost 15,000 people working with borrowers," said Tom Kelly, the spokesman.

Bank of America, the other lender Sheldon tried, also reports it has expanded its default-management staff - to more than 15,000.

But the scope of the problem is daunting. The federal government says 437,000 delinquent Chase borrowers are probably eligible for HAMP, and the company is working with hundreds of thousands more who hope to qualify for other loan-modification programs. Bank of America has an estimated 1 million HAMP-eligible borrowers, less than a quarter of whom were in trial plans as of February and just 21,000 of whom had been permanently modified.

After an hour on the phone with no results, Sheldon turned from his sparse cubicle with its many coffee cups to find Norton, his boss. "Any luck?" she asked.

"No," he said. "Spent a fair amount of time on hold."

Norton was not surprised.

"We're not able to take as many cases as we anticipated taking because the cases are taking so long," she said. "The dysfunction is what is so incredibly frustrating."

Many of the staffers deal with it by poking fun, a defense mechanism common among medical professionals. "You have to have a sense of humor," said counselor Stephanie Davis. If she and her co-workers don't laugh about what they see as a tragicomedy of errors, they'll think instead about what will happen if they don't succeed. Or about the late fees adding up every day for clients stuck in limbo.

Then there are the homeowners who don't do what they say they're going to do. When Norton left Sheldon to catch up with legal services coordinator Marva Cox, she learned that a client had yet to come in with a check for his lender to stop the auction of his home.

"Oh, I hate when this happens," Norton said heavily.

The bad news did not keep her from noticing - and worrying about - the frogginess in Cox's voice. Her staffers aren't taking time off when they should. Nor is Norton taking time for herself. By 2:30 p.m., she still hadn't had lunch.

"This is my normal day," she said, sitting in the lime-green office that makes her feel like she's inside a highlighter. "In the morning, the starting gun goes off and it's a sprint to the end."

St. Ambrose does eventually succeed with many of its homeowners. In the last six months of last year, only three clients out of about 1,000 lost their homes to foreclosure.

But a lot drop out before they get a resolution and don't respond to counselors' calls, their fate unknown. And some other homeowners still had to move. They voluntarily surrendered their homes - a better outcome than foreclosure mainly because St. Ambrose got the lenders to agree not to come after the borrowers for debt owed.

The group doesn't make all homeowners happy. One Ellicott City borrower evicted from her home last week said St. Ambrose failed to pass her loan-modification paperwork onto her lender.

"Somebody needs to find out why St. Ambrose did not do due diligence," said Jeanine Baumgardner, a Howard County NAACP volunteer who helped the borrower appeal her foreclosure.

Norton said St. Ambrose doesn't comment on individual cases. But speaking generally, she said, the nonprofit cannot submit paperwork to lenders until borrowers have provided all required documents.

St. Ambrose's services, offered for free, are covered by a patchwork of government money and foundation grants. Thus the work, though specialized, is not highly paid. Norton's salary went from six figures to five when she left a for-profit company for the nonprofit in 2007.

St. Ambrose acts like a magnet on Norton, 32. She left before and keeps returning.

She interned there while attending the University of Baltimore School of Law. After graduating magna cum laude in 2004, she lasted about five months at a law firm before quitting. The catalyst, she said, was having to sue a "very nice" elderly homeowner on behalf of a condo association.

"I like to work for the underdog," Norton said. So she went back to St. Ambrose, helping the nonprofit litigate a case with dozens of plaintiffs harmed by illegal property flipping. Here was a job she could square with her conscience. But she carried that work and the emotions of her clients home with her, day after day, until she couldn't do it any more. "I was burnt out," she said.

At the beginning of 2006, as the housing market was just starting to lose ground, she left to become general counsel for a mortgage lender. Consorting with the enemy, as some of her fellow nonprofit attorneys put it. "I gave her a lot of grief," recalled Phillip Robinson, executive director of Civil Justice, a Baltimore group that helps homeowners with foreclosure.

"It also gave her good experience," he conceded.

United Equity, the Towson firm where Norton worked, offered subprime and conventional loans - and went under in 2007 like many counterparts. St. Ambrose came calling just beforehand, wanting to increase foreclosure-prevention efforts. Once more, Norton reported to work at the red-brick rowhouse.

"I knew then, coming back into this type of environment, what that meant," she said. "That's why I'm so concerned about my staff."

Lisa R. Evans, deputy director at St. Ambrose, recruited Norton back, impressed by her insight into the way the mortgage industry works. Since then, Evans said, Norton has helped shape the state's evolving foreclosure laws. Hers was among the voices calling for a longer timeline between the first missed mortgage payment and foreclosure auction, a change that went into effect in 2008. Norton also helped advise legislators hammering out a foreclosure-mediation bill. Like Norton, Evans worries about burnout. They had hoped the crisis would have eased by now. Their new hope: a turnaround in 2012.

In the meantime, there are calls to loan servicers to make. Many calls.

"We're sorry," said the recorded voice on the other end of counselor Stretch's line. She had called a number given by a loan-servicer representative. "You have reached a number that has been disconnected or no longer -" With a grimace, Stretch hung up.