A sharp rise in foreclosures is destroying the single greatest generator of personal wealth for most Americans. 

The foreclosures fall particularly hard on black and Latino families.

Foreclosure victims have low incomes and little or no health insurance -- 40 percent of those who sought emergency foreclosure help cited medical costs as the cause of their distress.

Virginia, Maryland and the District have relatively low foreclosure rates -- analysts say troubled owners in those booming markets can still sell their homes before facing foreclosure.

  Should the nation's housing bubbles deflate, as many economists and federal officials expect, the foreclosures could prefigure a national crisis. Americans now shoulder record levels of housing debt -- more than 8 percent of homeowners spend at least half their income on their mortgage

  Interest-only and adjustable-rate mortgages account for 63 percent of new mortgages.

As home prices and personal debt rise to record levels, they note, homeownership has become an albatross for millions of Americans, destroying rather than creating wealth.

  Few of these homeowners were tutored in home buying, and 70 percent relied on "subprime" mortgage brokers, which specialize in buyers with bad credit and charge interest rates between 8 and 12 percent, far above market interest rates of 6 percent or less.

  A new class of lenders are willing to take on riskier and riskier borrowers at a very high price. Many of the products are nothing more than time bombs

  A foreclosure often costs upward of $10,000 in various legal, sheriff and bank fees. And people who have gone through foreclosure end up paying more for insurance and credit card interest and can get turned down for jobs that require good credit.

  Officials at Fannie Mae, the federally chartered mortgage giant designed to expand homeownership, suggest that the solution lies with more counseling and fine-tuning of mortgages for lower-income families.