About 30 unhappy Boston-area borrowers facing foreclosure and their supporters visited the offices of Credit Suisse in Boston on Thursday to demand the investment bank, which purchases and securitizes loans, require its loan servicing company to modify loans for “all families.”

“Before I joined ACORN [the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now], I couldn’t speak to a person in charge,” noted 26-year-old Leonard Habiyakare, a full-time college student, who said he got a $450,000 loan for his three-family home in Dorchester three years ago but couldn’t remember the lender. New York-based ACORN is a nationwide advocacy group for low- and moderate-income families.

Boston ACORN Executive Director Christopher Leonard said Habiyakare tried unsuccessfully for three months to reach Credit Suisse loan servicer Ocwen Financial when he realized his loan was in trouble.

“He actually got foreclosed on, but they modified the loan afterward,” Leonard said. Habiyakare said he is still in his home, “with ACORN’s help.”

Passersby in front of Credit Suisse’s One Federal St. office seemed curious but less than sympathetic.

“I don’t understand why they’re here. Credit Suisse has nothing to do with this,” one woman said. Another passerby remarked, “They need to pay their bills.”

A woman answering the phone at Credit Suisse said she didn’t understand why the protesters were at the Boston office.

“They should be in New York,” she said, where the investment bank’s mortgage securitization operations are located. A company spokesman declined comment.

Ocwen Senior Vice President and General Counsel Paul Koches said he’s troubled by the suggestion that his company doesn’t return phone calls.

Ocwen participates in the HOPE NOW coalition, a U.S. government-backed plan to freeze the interest rates on certain subprime mortgages for five years. It also contracts with the National Training and Information Center – a consumer outreach group – and the National Fair Housing Alliance in its efforts to reach out to borrowers in trouble, Koches said.

“If ACORN would truly would like us to assist a borrower and there is some communication problem, they know how to reach us and we would be more than happy to work with any borrower they refer to us,” he added.

Koches said Ocwen actually resolved 48,000 delinquent loans across the United States in 2007 and added that, according to an industry study it participated in a few years ago, it “leads the industry” in its ability to help borrowers avoid foreclosure.

Ocwen figures out ways for delinquent borrowers to avoid foreclosure 80 percent of the time, he said. The company currently services 440,000 subprime loans nationwide.

Nationally, in the third quarter of 2007, the mortgage industry modified 54,000 loans and established formal repayment plans for another 183,000 borrowers, the Washington, D.C.-based Mortgage Bankers Association reported this month. For borrowers of subprime adjustable-rate mortgage loans – the most likely type of loan to foreclose – there were approximately 13,000 loan modifications and 90,000 repayment plans established in the third quarter.

By comparison, foreclosure actions were started on approximately 384,000 loans, 166,000 of which were subprime ARM loans, in that quarter, MBA said.

However, it said, 18 percent of the subprime ARM borrowers were investors, not homeowners, and in 21 percent of the cases, the borrowers either could not be located or would not respond to the lender’s repeated attempts to contact them.

Ocwen, one of the nation’s largest subprime loan servicers, does not make loans, Koches pointed out, but has service contracts with lenders and loan securitizers.

Contracts generally require a servicer to collect payments and head off payment problems.

Odette Williamson, a staff attorney at the Boston office of the National Consumer Law Center, said servicing companies may say they’re doing modifications, but said many of them are not meaningful.

Borrowers may be offered altered repayment plans that don’t actually change the terms of their loan, she said, which doesn’t help.

“People default from day one [on such a repayment plan],” she said.

George Miller, executive director of the American Securitization Forum, a New York-based advocacy group for companies that package mortgages into securities, said most service contracts permit modifications such as extending a loan’s introductory interest rate, reducing the interest rate, forgiving a certain amount of the loan principal or extending the loan term.

A small minority of contracts forbid servicers from making any modifications at all, he said.

“Loan modification is just one of the many loss mitigation steps a servicer can take,” Miller added, noting that servicers have incentive to avoid foreclosure because it’s more expensive than any other alternative.

However, he said, “in many cases there is no reasonable modification” that can be offered.

Miller said loan servicers have increased staff recently to address increasing borrower delinquencies, but said it’s important to note that not every borrower is a “viable candidate” for a workout.