Sheila Ruest (left) and her daughter, Shelby, walk along Terragona Drive in Sorrento Springs. (ROBERTO GONZALEZ, ORLANDO SENTINEL / July 16, 2008)
It was once a young couple's dream house -- a four-bedroom piece of paradise overlooking a golf course.Now it is a financial albatross.
A phone book, soggy from weeks of afternoon rain, lies in a puddle by the doorstep. A family of wasps nests in the once-grand entryway. Weeds sprout between the brick pavers of the driveway. The place sits empty -- just like the house next door and the one across the street and a half-dozen more down the block.
This is Terragona Drive in Sorrento Springs, an upscale development amid the lush, rolling pastureland of rural Lake County. It has an 18-hole golf course, a resortlike clubhouse, tennis courts, walking trails and neat rows of two-story, earth-toned homes with architectural flourishes.
But like dozens of developments throughout Central Florida, Sorrento Springs blossomed circa 2005, just as the housing market began to wither. Now it is rife with foreclosures.
There are investors who gambled on ever-rising housing prices -- and lost. There are families whose breadwinners lost their jobs -- and now face losing their homes. There are kids who have lost friends; moms who've lost support networks; renters who have been booted out because the banks are foreclosing on their landlords.
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