Communities foreclosed: as more Latino and Black families lose their homes, the impact spreads over neighborhoods.(FEATURE)

AS SOON AS HE TOLD HER they wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage, Ruben Loera's wife's heart clenched. She started packing away the angels and pulling down the paintings. Five months later and one step away from foreclosure, half-empty boxes are piled in a corner of the living room in their home in Maryvale, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.

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Loera had been hearing tales of people losing their houses, but he never thought it would happen to his family. "I had to make a decision: I pay the house, or I feed my kids," said Loera, who migrated legally to the United States from Mexico almost 30 years ago and has a daughter and a son, ages 17 and 11.

Loera's story is common these days. Although many families are experiencing foreclosures, job losses and increased debt, community advocates say that Latinos and Blacks are feeling the effects most acutely. These two communities are bearing the brunt of high unemployment rates, a disproportionate rate of receiving subprime mortgages and greater risk of foreclosures.

"People are getting hit from all sides," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. "It's not just their income. Any wealth [that] families had is getting erased, too."

A United for a Fair Economy study released in 2008 estimated that the foreclosure crisis might strip as much as $213 billion in assets from Black and Latino households.

Loera bought his home in 2002. He had a perfectly good loan with a fixed interest rate until 2006, when he got a phone call from Countrywide Financial promising a great deal on a refinance. He was trustful, since it was the same company that gave him his first loan. "They told me it was money I earned that I wouldn't have to pay," he recalled.