There are times when it pays to have a neighborhood guy, one who has been around the block a few times, as mayor for life.

Just take Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s bold bid to head off a full-scale, Las Vegas-style foreclosure crisis in the Hub. The mayor’s ahead-of-the-curve drive has won national recognition, providing a model for mayors across the country on how to battle this epidemic.

More importantly, it has kept hundreds of Boston residents in their homes at a time when thousands are losing their homes in boomtowns gone bust like Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Of course, you would never know it these days, with Menino fast becoming a favorite punching bag in a particularly acrimonious mayoral race. Last Tuesday’s victory, if anything, will only intensify the carping.

Under The Radar

And while his individual initiatives have received their fare share of dutiful B section coverage, the overall scope of his accomplishment has gone largely unheralded.

Yes, foreclosures have hit some Boston neighborhoods like Dorchester really hard. But the Hub’s supply of foreclosed homes, which number in the hundreds, can’t compare with a city like Cleveland, with 10,000 boarded up and bank-owned homes and condos.

“We have been very aggressive,” said Menino of the city’s success on the foreclosure issue. “I have been out there personally. We continue to be out in the neighborhoods.”

Evelyn Friedman, director of the Department of Neighborhood Development, agrees.

“The number of foreclosures would have been double had we not had these programs,” she said.

The mayor may be taking his hits for holding onto Boston’s throne longer than any other mayor, but longevity can have its advantages when it comes to getting the job done.

As a city councilor representing Hyde Park in the early 1990s, Menino vividly recalls the flood of foreclosures that hit the city in the aftermath of another wave of shoddy mortgage lending.

That time around, it was reckless savings and loans institutions that created the mess, as opposed to crazy subprime lenders now.

“It was a real mess,” he recalled.

When, later in the decade, he started seeing ads in local newspapers touting no money down mortgages and hearing about balloon notes, he became alarmed and called a friend to discuss the situation.

“They are all going to come crashing down,” he was told.

Menino swung into action: Hence the launch of Don’t Borrow Trouble, a campaign warning city homeowners of the perils of subprime lenders and their too-good-to-be-true offers.

That, of course, was back in 1999, when I guarantee you few people outside the mortgage lending business knew – or cared – about the emerging business of subprime lending.

In the ultimate compliment, Freddie Mac stole the name and launched its own national campaign based on the Boston model.

When those loans started to go bad back in 2005, the mayor was ahead of the curve once again.

After noticing a jump in the number of foreclosure petitions, Menino roused his City Hall staff to action with a simple warning.

“When he heard about all these subprime loans, he said, ‘Oh, it’s happening again.’ He had lived through this before he was mayor,” Friedman notes.

Early Cooperation

That led to a series of cutting-edge rescue efforts aimed at reaching struggling homeowners.

One of the first came in 2006, when the city recruited a number of mainstream banks to refinance homeowners struggling to make payments on high-cost subprime loans.

That program only had limited success. But it gave city officials an important, first-hand look at some of these loans, which were often so bad they simply could not be refinanced.

And that, in turn, served as an important heads up about the magnitude of the suddenly ballooning foreclosure crisis, Friedman notes.

“As soon as we saw these predatory loans, we knew we were in for trouble,” Friedman added. “We knew these loans were unsustainable.”

“Other cities were not on the radar as far as this was concerned,” she noted.

Menino and city housing officials responded by expanding City Hall’s in-house foreclosure prevention program and launching a foreclosure call center.

While the mayor has been unable to stop what has been a national epidemic from infecting Boston as well, his aggressive, early-bird approach has certainly blunted the impact.

Banks and other lenders have seized more than 2,300 residential properties since the foreclosure crisis erupted in 2006. But city officials estimate they have prevented another 1,222 homeowners from being booted onto the streets.

All told, there are still about 930 foreclosed homes and properties sitting unsold and empty across the city, mainly in low and moderate income neighborhoods like Dorchester, East Boston, Roxbury, Hyde Park and Mattapan.

While hardly a wonderful number, that stands in contrast to Cleveland’s legion of 10,000 bank-owned properties, Washington, D.C.’s 2,400 and Baltimore’s 1,500.

But as other cities still grapple with how to prevent foreclosures, Menino and company are focusing on tackling the next and final stage of this crisis.

That, namely, is what to do with all those hundreds of bank-owned homes across the Hub, empty and often boarded up magnets for all sorts of trouble.

As an incentive, there’s an offer of $15,000 in down-payment assistance and another $50,000 in loan money.

But buying up foreclosed condos and homes has proven to be more difficult for those new to the game, with speculators armed with cash having proven to be difficult competitors, Friedman said.

Buoyed with more than $8 million in federal funds, city officials are now buying up foreclosed properties directly, with plans to then resell to individual buyers and nonprofit developers. So far, the city has taken the deed to 19 properties, with plans to acquire as many as 100.

Who knows how much recognition locally Menino’s latest dogged attempt to rein in the foreclosure crisis will get.

But don’t count on the mayor to kick back and rest on his laurels – he’s not that kind of guy.

“We have to be vigilant out there,” Menino said.