Foreclosures

The housing plan unveiled by President Obama on Wednesday goes further than any previous effort to break the vicious cycle of declining home values, rising mortgage defaults and frozen credit that triggered the country's worst recession since the 1930s. And it embraces strategies that attack the complex problems on several fronts but without requiring a long struggle in Congress.

Just as the nation's housing market has begun showing signs of stabilizing, another wave of foreclosures is poised to strike, possibly as early as this summer, inflicting new punishment on families, communities and the still-troubled national economy. Amid rising unemployment and falling home prices, mortgage defaults have surged to record levels this year.

Moving to contain a public relations mess, Wells Fargo & Co. fired a top executive accused of using a bank-owned Malibu beach house to entertain her family and friends. Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for commercial foreclosed properties, broke company rules barring personal use of bank property, Wells Fargo said in a statement Monday. The Times reported last week that Guyton had been spotted by neighbors spending time at the Malibu Colony home with her family this summer.

More Californians are failing to make their mortgage payments than at any time in the last 20 years, but fewer of them are losing their homes, according to new figures. The drop in foreclosures follows moratoriums adopted by major banks and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The increase in loan defaults, meanwhile, suggests that rising unemployment and the continuing recession are still claiming fresh victims.

You're paying your bills, but your landlord isn't. And you're the one holding the eviction notice. This is becoming an all-too-familiar scenario for thousands of renters nationwide who have become the unintended victims of foreclosures. Banks are booting good tenants onto the streets with little to no notice after seizing a property from a delinquent owner, ignoring tenant leases.

Miss a mortgage payment, and the foreclosure clock starts ticking. In as little as five months, the sheriff could be at the door, ordering you to leave the house that is no longer your home. But free help is available, including professional legal advice, and a host of ways to stop the clock. Or it might make sense to simply run the clock out, staying in the house at no cost until you're kicked out. The only inherently bad choices when faced with a foreclosure are delay and denial.

More California hotels are being pushed into foreclosure as tourists and businesses alike scale back their travel plans and owners are unable to pay their mortgages. Statewide, more than 300 hotels were in foreclosure or default on their loans as of Sept. 30 -- a nearly fivefold increase since the start of the year, according to an industry report released Tuesday. The list of troubled properties includes the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, the downtown Los Angeles Marriott, the Sheraton Universal and the W hotel in San Diego.

Jerry and Carol Ptacek bounced from one cramped apartment to another most of their adult lives, so they could hardly believe their luck when they were able to buy a San Bernardino house for the bargain price of $63,000. Nine years later, they are renters again -- a testament to the failure of the federal government's Dollar Homes program. Congress launched the program in 1998 to clear the Department of Housing and Urban Development's books of foreclosures and provide affordable housing.

More than 236,000 homes were lost to foreclosure in California last year, topping the previous nine years combined, data released Tuesday show. And the number of borrowers who defaulted on their payments hit a record high of more than 404,000. The wave of foreclosures, which began in early 2007, was initially triggered by falling home values and resets on adjustable-rate loans.

The slump in the hospitality business -- made worse by the real estate crash -- has led to dramatic increases in the number of hotels that can't pay their bills. About 250 hotels are in default or foreclosure in California, according to the Irvine consulting firm Atlas Hospitality Group. Los Angeles County has the highest number of troubled hotels: 27, including the 469-room Marriott in downtown L.A., according to a new Atlas report.