Once earned $136,000, now on the bread line

A man fills out an employment application form while food banks report a 20 per cent increase in demand. Photo / AP

The story that has left Tina Blanco standing in the long line outside a Californian food bank will be depressingly familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the volatile collision of greed, recklessness, and sheer bad luck that has prompted America's greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A surgical technician, who spent 10 years commuting from Stockton, a once prosperous city in the San Joaquin Valley, to San Francisco's General Hospital 90-odd minutes away, her life was turned upside down in 2006, when she discovered a lump in her left breast which turned out to be malignant.

Treatment for cancer left the 45-year-old single mother of two unable to work. Her income, which had been a comfortable US$77,000 ($136,000)-a-year, was halved to US$33,000 under her employer's insurance plan. Soon she found herself struggling to meet payments on a US$1650-a-month mortgage.

Today, Blanco is living the nightmare of negative equity. The three-bedroom home in one of Stockton's leafier suburbs, which she bought for US$210,000 six years ago, and at the height of the property boom was valued at US$300,000, is now worth US$150,000. Her debts against it are US$185,000. Now five months in arrears, she faces imminent eviction.

If President Barack Obama is to set America on a path out of recession, then he's going to have to start making a difference to people like Tina Blanco.

The President's ambitious economic stimulus package has dominated political debate during his first 100 days in office. Now he must show that it can also change lives.

Blanco is in urgent need of the help. On Thursday, for the first time in her adult life, she swallowed her pride, grabbed a couple of cardboard boxes, and drove to Stockton Food Bank, where parcels of mostly out-of-date food are distributed to anyone willing to brave the hour-long queue.

"I feel like this is the last pit-stop. I have hit rock bottom," she says, while volunteers filled her boxes with tired-looking produce. "I feel let down: I always played by the rules. I just got unlucky.

"I could declare myself bankrupt. But I've been cancer-free now for six months, and I want to get back to work and pay my debts off. My bank's not interested in working out a payment plan, though, and I don't get help from the Government. There's an income bracket, and I fall into it, where people are too rich to be helped, but too poor to afford to live."

For now, she is prepared to give her President the benefit of the doubt. "Obama is a likeable man," says Blanco. "I voted for him. But my patience will not last forever. So far, he's been helping banks and car companies, and executives at AIG. When's he going to help the little guy?"

Obama must also demonstrate that his injection of taxpayers' cash can help places like Stockton. House prices tripled here between 1998 and 2005, thanks to families seeking an affordable bolthole within a couple of hours of San Francisco's bay area. But last year, they dropped 39 per cent. They are forecast to fall by a further third in 2009.

Stockton has just under 300,000 residents, and isn't used to being in the spotlight. But it recently suffered a blow to civic pride when it was declared "America's most miserable city" by Forbes magazine, in a survey that took into account factors such as crime, unemployment, tax rates, prosperity and commute times.

At the Stockton Food Bank, volunteers report a 20 per cent increase in demand, mostly fuelled by "middle-class" people like Blanco.

At the nearby homeless shelter, which provides food and lodging for the county's large population of 2000 homeless people, occupancy is also up 20 per cent, according to the manager John Reynolds.

He says: "We see a lot of people who have been renting homes, and their landlords go into foreclosure. They have no idea, until one day the bailiffs knock on the door telling them they've got a fortnight to clear out. The landlord has already taken their next month's rent, and can't pay their deposit back. They're suddenly left with nothing."

The first task facing Obama, then, is to stem the bleeding caused by the housing crisis. In Stockton, this means that "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects, which will employ thousands of locals, must get under way.

Miseryville

Stockton, California:

* 300,000 residents.
* 16.3 per cent unemployment.
* 16,000 homes involved in foreclosure.
* 2000 homeless.
* 20 per cent increase in foodbank demand.

- INDEPENDENT