San Jose Mercury News story

Dave Coull · San Jose Mercury News story

"the lawns were still green. But behind closed doors, there was rage, despair, and talk of suicide."

From the San Jose Mercury News, Sunday 12th October

Financial crisis: Homeowners in Manteca neighborhood cope with foreclosures

By Julia Prodis Sulek

Dave Cantrell considered loading the U-Haul in the middle of the night and leaving while his neighbors were asleep. He couldn't bear to face them. He had become a community leader here, rallying his neighbors to stand up to the builder that was planning to auction off one-third of their new Paseo West subdivision at 40 percent discounts.

For one brief night in his living room on Cistus Street, with his neighbors raising their voices and pointing their fingers, they had united against the one they thought was responsible for their impending misfortune. Cantrell believed he made a difference, that maybe the auction prices wouldn't be as low as he feared, that they would all recover. He promised to have a block party when it was all over.

But in the next 12 months, the housing crisis swept across the country, titans of the banking world disappeared and daily stock market tumbles of 800 points became commonplace. And the one man who tried to save his neighborhood failed. In the end, he couldn't even save himself.

Like millions of Americans, Cantrell, 57, found himself powerless against the economic storm that has devastated his comfortable life in a tidy little subdivision in California's Central Valley — a place that was supposed to be the Promised Land for families who couldn't afford a house in the Bay Area. The mournful dirge of moving vans rumbling through Paseo West is a sound echoing across the country, where the mortgage crisis has sent more than a million families into foreclosure and out of their homes, leaving neighborhoods choking on dark clouds of exhaust.......

(full story, several pages long, at
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_10701409?nclick_check=1)