At a Lake Elsinore housing office, Kelly Porec, left, goes over paperwork with Ruth Cordoba, a 28-year-old mother of three who has brought along 3-year-old Joseph. Cordoba is trying to find another place to live after she and her children were evicted from a Section 8 rental that had fallen into foreclosure.
Tenants subsidized by federal Section 8 funds are finding themselves out of a home when the landlord defaults.
Ruth Cordoba has never owned a home, but she is feeling the effects of the mortgage meltdown acutely.
Cordoba, 28, rented a three-bedroom home in Riverside for six months with the help of so-called Section 8 funds, money provided by the federal government through local housing agencies. In June, when her landlord could no longer make the mortgage payments on the house Cordoba was renting, she and her three children had to move to a hotel.
"I never missed a rent payment," Cordoba said. "Then I hear someone outside one morning, and I go outside and see a sign on my door that says they're auctioning the house."
The collapse of home mortgage lending, which according to U.S. Housing Secretary Steve Preston may lead to 2.5 million foreclosure filings nationwide this year, sent shock waves up the income strata -- from home buyers who took out subprime loans they couldn't pay, through banks that couldn't cover their losses on those loans, and onto high-end investors who had bought the banks' bad loans.
Now the mortgage crisis is radiating downward and cracking the already fragile finances of people like Cordoba. There are more than 300,000 households getting Section 8 assistance in California, and their median income is $14,428, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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Cordoba, 28, rented a three-bedroom home in Riverside for six months with the help of so-called Section 8 funds, money provided by the federal government through local housing agencies. In June, when her landlord could no longer make the mortgage payments on the house Cordoba was renting, she and her three children had to move to a hotel.
"I never missed a rent payment," Cordoba said. "Then I hear someone outside one morning, and I go outside and see a sign on my door that says they're auctioning the house."
The collapse of home mortgage lending, which according to U.S. Housing Secretary Steve Preston may lead to 2.5 million foreclosure filings nationwide this year, sent shock waves up the income strata -- from home buyers who took out subprime loans they couldn't pay, through banks that couldn't cover their losses on those loans, and onto high-end investors who had bought the banks' bad loans.
Now the mortgage crisis is radiating downward and cracking the already fragile finances of people like Cordoba. There are more than 300,000 households getting Section 8 assistance in California, and their median income is $14,428, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Read more news...
