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More than two years into the mortgage crisis, unemployment has changed the face of foreclosure in Montgomery County, according to county officials.

And more residents are seeking help before they default, but the county has been overwhelmed by the demand — there is a one-month wait to speak to a foreclosure counselor, according to Rick Nelson, director of the county Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

Once predominantly the purview of subprime borrowers, residents who have lost their jobs are increasingly finding themselves in danger of losing their homes as well, according to Catherine Matthews, director of the Upcounty Regional Services Center.

"It's a more complex issue because they have no income now," Matthews said. "We're seeing people who have tapped into their life savings."

Prime fixed-rate mortgages accounted for the largest share of new foreclosures in the first quarter of 2009, surpassing riskier subprime, adjustable rate and alternative A-paper loans for the first time since the subprime market took off in the 1990s, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, a national real estate finance industry group headquartered in Washington, D.C.

"It's one thing to modify a mortgage if you have less income coming in, but if you have no income, it's impossible," Nelson said. As more people lose their jobs and are unable to pay their mortgages, foreclosures in the county have continued unabated, he said.

"We haven't seen a significant reduction," Nelson said. "A year ago I would've thought we'd be tailing off, but now the economy has come in and impacted it. That's just thrown these forecasts out the window."

The county has made strides in letting residents know that help is available, but demand has outpaced supply for foreclosure counseling. The counselors are provided by three nonprofits — The Housing Initiative Partnership in Germantown, HomeFree-USA in Gaithersburg and the Latino Economic Development Corporation in Wheaton — and funded by the county and state.

The county doubled its counseling staff from four to eight in April and hopes to soon add two more, Nelson said.

Maryland tallied 9,289 foreclosure events in the first quarter of 2009, a 7.4 percent drop from the previous quarter, according to the most recent data available from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.

Montgomery County had the second highest number of foreclosures in the state after Prince George's County with 1,794 filings, 19.3 percent of all filings in the state, according to the state housing department.

Nineteen Montgomery ZIP codes were designated by the state as foreclosure hot spots, or communities with more than 10 foreclosures and a foreclosure ratio, calculated by determining how much a community's foreclosure rate is above or below the state average, higher than 100, according to the data. Seven communities were named "severe" hot spots — Germantown (20874) with 229 foreclosures, Montgomery Village (20886) with 148, Gaithersburg (20877) with 118, Gaithersburg (20879) with 114, Germantown (20876) with 87, Burtonsville (20866) with 61 and Silver Spring (20903) with 38. Twelve other ZIP codes in Boyds, Clarksburg, Damascus, Gaithersburg, Rockville, Silver Spring and Takoma Park were labeled either "high" or "very high." Foreclosure hot spots are categorized by how much higher their foreclosure rate is than the state average.

The upcounty represented half of all foreclosure activity, which includes notices of default, notices of foreclosure sales and lender purchases of foreclosed properties, in the county in the last three months of 2008, and foreclosures are continuing to be concentrated in Gaithersburg, Germantown and Wheaton, Nelson said.

The crisis is also trickling down to renters who find themselves out on the street when their landlords are facing foreclosure. An estimated 40 percent of households that lose their homes to foreclosure are renters, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

"When we talk about foreclosures, people typically don't think of tenants — they think of homeowners," said Tedi Osias, director of legislative and public affairs for the county Housing Opportunities Commission, adding that many tenants don't know their rights when faced with eviction. The commission has been receiving more calls for emergency assistance and increased interest in its housing voucher program, though Osias said it's hard to tell how much of the rising demand is related to foreclosure. "We do have a sense of our participants being in a greater deal of distress," she said. "The economic stresses overwhelm them."

For more information about foreclosure counseling, visit www.montgomerycountymd.gov/

content/dhca/housing/foreclosure/

gethelp.asp.