By Emily Bazar, USA TODAY

DENVER — Low-skilled immigrants are taking a hard hit from the faltering economy, losing jobs, sending less money to families overseas and cutting back spending at businesses that cater to them.

The effect is most pronounced on immigrants, both legal and illegal, working in struggling sectors such as construction and manufacturing, says Rakesh Kochhar, associate director for research at the Pew Hispanic Center, a non-partisan research organization. The center estimates there are 11.9 million illegal immigrants in the USA this year.

“People with less skills or less education, and especially those who are in blue-collar jobs, are historically more vulnerable to downturns,” he says. “The Hispanic immigrant is more likely to be less skilled, less educated and more blue collar” compared with the overall labor force.

In October, the jobless rate was 6.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the rate for Hispanics was 8.8%. Slightly more than half of the Hispanic labor force is foreign-born, Kochhar says.

At La Piñata Loca, a party supply store on Federal Boulevard here, business has dropped 45% since August, owner Xochitl Alvarez says.

Alvarez blames her falling profits on factors including the bad economy and immigrants’ fears over stepped-up workplace raids by federal agents. Some of her customers have lost their jobs and others have voluntarily returned to their native countries because of the economy or tougher enforcement measures, she says.

“My Anglo customers are still here,” says Alvarez, a U.S. citizen. “My Hispanic customers just don’t want to spend the money.”

• Day laborers may be among the most affected. At the WeCount! Community Worker Center in south Miami, 20 to 30 laborers come in each day to find work, but only one or two land jobs that pay about $10 per hour, director Selene Echeverria says.

• Remittances to some countries, which had been rising steadily, are down. Through September, Mexican immigrants sent $673 million less back home compared with the same period last year, a 3.7% drop, says Robert Meins, remittances specialist for the Inter-American Development Bank.

• Immigrants who make less spend less. Revenue at Hispanic-owned businesses was down 15% to 20% from July through September, compared with the same quarter last year, says David Lizárraga, chairman of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

In Denver, Alvarez is getting creative. She’s cutting prices of some star-shapedpiñatas if customers purchase two and is offering layaway plans. “I’m trying to be flexible with the prices. I will even negotiate with customers,” she says. “We’re trying to see if we can make it.”

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It took a 777-point nose dive of the stock market for many Americans to realize that the financial crisis is the real deal. The multibillion-dollar package to rescue Wall Street got a little more support among taxpayers when they finally understood that as bad as it sounds, not approving it could be much worse. Almost everyone in the United States has been affected by the economic crisis. But according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, the economic slump has disproportionately affected Latino workers, who make up 14 percent of the job market in the United States.

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New America Media, News Report, Ngoc Nguyen

After 16 years and 700 issues under its current publisher, the San Francisco Bay View printed its last issue in July. The biweekly, a political newspaper covering the African-American community, has weathered many storms, said publisher Mary Ratcliff, but nothing as bad as the foreclosure crisis.

The newspaper received a good chunk of its revenue from ads – mostly from national advertisers and local hospitals groups, nonprofits and city government agencies, rather than from small businesses – but the amount didn’t cover its expenses. The couple refinanced their home loan to get enough cash flow to keep the newspaper afloat. The scheme worked during the real estate bubble, but was disastrous amid the subprime loan crisis.

“We lost [our] property in a foreclosure auction a week ago yesterday,” Ratcliff said. She and her husband lived in a multi-unit building and also rented out three storefronts, which allowed them to make the monthly payments on the loan.

As a last resort, Ratcliff said they may move to Texas. “My husband has property from his parents…it has timber and ranch land…he doesn’t want to go [to Texas]. He wants to stay in San Francisco and so do I,” she said.

For now, she’s publishing stories on the San Francisco Bay View’s Web site.

In Southern California, the KoreAm Journal, a monthly magazine covering the Korean-American experience for 18 years, recently published an open letter to readers pleading for new subscribers and donations to keep the magazine afloat. They’ve lost about a third of their advertising.

“That’s huge,” said managing editor Michelle Woo. “Ads account for 70 percent of revenue. What really jumped us into action was seeing some other ethnic publications fold suddenly.”

Ethnic media are still the most robust segment of journalism, but now they’re being squeezed too as the mortgage meltdown hits Main Street. Ethnic media have long been dependent on advertising from small businesses – especially from real estate – so as these businesses feel the pinch, so does the ethnic press.

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By Tracy Turner
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

The housing and subprime-mortgage crisis stands to cost minority homeowners 40 percent more of their wealth than white homeowners in similar circumstances, an advocacy group says.

Some estimates put the loss for African-American homeowners who lose homes to foreclosure at $122 billion, while Latino homeowners stand to lose up to $129 billion, according to a study by the nonprofit group United for a Fair Economy.

A national conference on subprime lending, foreclosures and race is being held today and Friday, hosted by Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for Race and Ethnicity.

National experts on race, law, finance and real estate will examine the subprime crisis’ disproportionate effects on African-Americans and Latinos, and try to develop solutions for the growing problem, said Jason Reece, a senior researcher at the Kirwan Institute.

Speakers will include Paul C. Hudson, chairman and chief executive of Broadway Financial Corp. and Broadway Federal Bank in Los Angeles, and Jim Carr, chief operating officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a group of local development organizations.

Reece said the problem is significant, noting that the predatory lending, exotic loans and foreclosures that first hit the African-American and Latino communities later spread beyond them.

“It impacts the entire housing market and can drag down the entire economy,” he said. “A comprehensive response to the issue is needed, not just to stabilize Wall Street but to deal with the surge in vacant properties and keep more people from going into foreclosure.”

The problem is significant in Ohio and across the nation, consumer advocates say.

Nationwide, African-American borrowers are as much as 34 percent more likely to receive higher-rate subprime loans than whites are, even when the incomes and credit risks are equal, according to a 2006 study by the Center for Responsible Lending.

In Ohio, 58 percent of home loans received by African-Americans were higher-rate loans, compared with 35 percent of loans received by Latinos, 21 percent by whites and 16 percent by Asians, according to the Housing Research and Advocacy Center in Cleveland.

In Columbus last year, 57.8 percent of black home buyers and 33 percent of Latino home buyers received subprime loans, compared with 22.4 percent of white home buyers, according to a study by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Not all industry experts agree that the subprime crisis disproportionately affects minorities.

The subprime-lending meltdown is better described as a mainstream, white, suburban problem with aspects that affect minorities and urban communities, said Maurice Jourdain-Earl, a founder and managing director of Compliance Technologies.

The Arlington, Va.-based lending-industry consultancy released a report last month that found that of the more than 1.9 million subprime loans originated in 2006, 56 percent went to non-Hispanic whites. And 39 percent were obtained by borrowers with annual incomes that were 120 percent or more of their area’s median income.

But minorities have received proportionally more subprime loans than nonminorities. And the problem isn’t that poor people took out loans for homes they couldn’t afford, but that the community that is the most vulnerable was given bad loans, said john powell, executive director of the Kirwan Institute. “Forty percent of the black community who got subprime loans were eligible for market-rate loans,” powell said. “The problem is not that they couldn’t afford the loan, but had the wrong loan product for them.”

To fix the crisis, powell said, the credit system has to be changed to make it fair to homeowners and the banking industry. The focus now is on saving banks; the homeowners are forgotten, he said.

“If you just save the banks, you’ll punish the community by locking them out of the credit system,” powell said. “It’s not about individual greed but a system that doesn’t work.”

tturner@dispatch.com

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Congressman Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Congressman Joe Baca (D-CA), Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and concerned citizens gathered outside of the Republican National Committee in Washington, DC today to highlight John McCain’s record of putting corporate CEOs ahead of working families. The event coincides with the release of the Obama-Biden campaign’s launch of a new television ad that shows that McCain visited Bermuda and pledged to protect the corporate tax breaks for American companies that hide their profits offshore. In return, the grateful insurance company executives and their lobbyists who stand to benefit gave McCain $50,000. Click HERE to watch the Obama-Biden ad “Destination.”

Congressman Xavier Becerra (D-CA):

“We are here to tell Sen. John McCain you can run for president, but you can’t hide from your record and the facts. And as much as you may run to places like Bermuda and make promises to some of the same industries and companies that have taken their operations offshore, you can’t hide from the fact that you’ve been helping a lot of these folks that have caused the financial meltdown we’re suffering from today. Ladies and gentleman, we’re here to say that the facts will determine who becomes the next president of the United States. And John McCain must face his record on the facts. And the facts are these: not long ago, John McCain decided to take a trip to Bermuda, and while he was there he spoke to many of those same executives that today have left Wall Street and America reeling. What he said to them was that he thinks they’re a great industry to go offshore from America and locate their business, at least on paper, off the shores of this country and take advantage of the tax haven status that they get in places like this in Bermuda. In fact, he said he would protect their interests if he became president of the United States. And so as we see all these folks here wearing shorts that are surrounding us, that may be all they can afford if John McCain becomes president of the United States of America.”

Congressman Joe Baca (D-CA):

“Is not about those overseas, is about us here in the United States. And this is what we are talking about, not giving a tax break to those corporations that continue to go overseas. The Great Depression now wants us to do the same thing for health care that was done for banking. McCain has called himself the fundamentally deregulator - and has supported the massive agenda of deregulation that has led us to this economic crisis.

Remember he was supported what has led us to the crisis that we are in now. Despite the current economic crisis this month McCain wrote that it would be a good idea to deregulate the health insurance markets as well as we have done over the last decade. Can you image what would have happen if we would have deregulated Social Security and privatize it? My Lord! This is what he wanted. This is what he voted on. This what he supported along with the president of the United States. We want to run health care like it has been running in Wall Street. That is not what the people want they already know is dangerous and that’s a bad idea we can’t afford it.”

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By ADRIAN SAINZ and ALAN ZIBEL, AP

MIAMI - Al Ray is so strapped for cash, the only time he eats out is on Wednesday or Sunday, when the local McDonald’s sells hamburgers for 49 cents.

Ray lost his engineering job last November, and has been working as high school tutor, scratching out about $1,000 a month — if he’s lucky. He satruggled to make his $1,400 monthly mortgage payment and $330 monthly homeowners’ association fee until May, when he stopped paying.

Ray, 44, is looking for work and renting out a room in his two-bedroom condo in Davie, Fla., for $500, but his monthly income doesn’t match his expenses and he’s facing foreclosure.

“I barely have money to survive,” he said.

Ray is one of more than 7.5 million people — almost 15 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage — who are spending half of their income or more on housing costs, according to 2007 data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. That is up from nearly 7.1 million the year before.

Traditionally, the government and most lenders consider a homeowner spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs to be financially burdened. But that definition now covers almost 38 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage — 19 million of them.

Though home prices have fallen this year, in the most expensive markets where home prices tripled during the boom, many working families still cannot afford to buy a home.

“We had a bubble,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. “This is a case where we absolutely want the market to adjust.”

The data underscore the serious affordability problems in this country and highlight how the slightest financial problem — from a lost job to higher gas prices or insurance premiums — can put a family behind on their mortgages and into the realm of foreclosure.

When home prices fell in the early 1990s, borrowers had more equity in their homes, and were able to escape foreclosure. But now, an estimated 10 million homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, according to Moody’s economy.com.

More than 4 million homeowners were at least one month behind on their loans at the end of June, and almost 500,000 had started the foreclosure process, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Cascading foreclosures over the past two years created a domino effect in the lending industry, undermining investor confidence and forcing the Bush administration last weekend to announce the greatest rescue package and market intervention since the Great Depression.

And yet, the deal will not help Dolly Hanna, 51, and her husband, who bought five homes in the San Francisco area over the past 20 years, and were enjoying life during the housing boom by renting them out.

But her husband’s overtime at his mechanic’s job was cut, and the Hannas now find themselves overextended at a loss of $15,000 per month and trying two sell two of the homes.

With four children, Hanna had been a stay-at-home mom, but Monday she started a job in real estate. They are seeking a renter for two upstairs bedrooms in their primary residence for $1,200.

Getting a loan during the boom was easy, Hanna knows. Too easy.

“All you had to was massage the information enough to fit it into their round hole, and they gave us a mortgage,” Hanna said.

In San Francisco, more than one out of five homeowners with a mortgage spends half or more of their income on housing.

That’s also true in 13 more of the largest 100 metro areas analyzed by the Associated Press. Other places include California metro areas of Stockton, Los Angeles, Riverside, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, San Francisco, and San Diego. Also in the top 10 are the Fort Myers, Sarasota and Orlando metro areas in Florida, and New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island.

But the most cost-burdened homeowners in the country live the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach metro area: 58 percent of homeowners spending 30 percent of their income on housing costs, and 29 percent spending half of their income or more on housing.

Though prices here are dropping, the high cost of land, construction, insurance and property taxes makes living in South Florida too expensive for some.

“Certainly, we hear about people leaving South Florida and going into Atlanta where they can get into a house for less money,” Suzanne Weiss, associate director for real estate with Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida.

To help with the affordable housing stock, Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida joined forces with a construction company to build homes for low- to moderate-income residents that include energy-efficient appliances and hurricane-resistant windows.

Other cities and states are also taking action.

In Illinois, a network of 15 nonprofit housing groups gives free advice to struggling homeowners seeking to avoid foreclosure amid rising mortgage payments.

In New England, an affordable housing program funded by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston awards grants and low-interest loans to communities to encourage affordable-housing initiatives for very low- to moderate-income households.

And in Las Vegas, the Nevada Fair Housing Center is helping Rita Harvey renegotiate her mortgage from $2,700 to around $1,800 per month.

Harvey, 64, lives on about $3,300 a month in social security and disability payments for herself and her four disabled grandchildren. She nearly lost her home this summer after her adjustable rate mortgage payment jumped.

“I did not understand that in two years, this would adjust out of control,” she said. “Nobody deserves what I’ve had to go through.”

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Via New America Media

Three years ago, Carmen Ruiz, 51, of San Bruno, owed $3,000 on a second mortgage and needed help with sorting through her debt. When she asked her tax preparation aide for financial advice, he calmly reassured her, saying, “I know an angel who can help and I will send him to you.”

The “angel” came in the form of a crooked predatory lender posing as a church pastor. He promised Ruiz that he would eliminate her debt by refinancing her home—as long as she trusted him and didn’t tell anyone he was helping her.

He convinced Ruiz that he needed to take out her loan in his brother’s name (her credit was poor, he reasoned), and arranged for Ruiz to pay him back in monthly cash installments (he was too busy to cash checks at a bank, he claimed).

“He made me sign papers even though he knew I had a brain tumor and couldn’t see or read well,” Ruiz says. For an entire year, she sent him monthly cash payments, so she was shocked when her house suddenly went into foreclosure. Her “angel” had taken her money and fled.

It was at that point that Ruiz sought assistance from local organizations. Through the Mission Economic Development Agency(MEDA), a San Francisco-based organization that helps immigrant and working class Latino families, Ruiz met Jacqueline Marcelos, 38, of Bernal Heights, who was also a victim of housing fraud. Marcelos and her family had been swindled of equity worth $200,000. It took them two years and hundreds of hours of education and work to organize an investigation and get their district attorney’s attention.

Although the men who conned Ruiz and Marcelos are serving jail time now, both women are still fighting to hold on to their housing. “Up ‘til today, we still have not been able to find restitution for the theft,” Marcelos says. “The broker, the landlord, and the bank have all enriched themselves with government compensation for these fraudulent crimes…We demand dignity in housing.”

Subprime loans, which are made to borrowers who have bad credit, and predatory lending are the main forces behind the foreclosure crisis that is hitting the nation. There are 7.5 million subprime loan borrowers and $1.4 trillion in loans outstanding, according to a 2006 study conducted by the Center for Responsible Lending, a research organization and resource on predatory lending. About 40 percent of all subprime loans nationwide were issued to Latino households. An estimated 5,760 Latino families are projected to lose their homes due to foreclosures.

In San Francisco, the study projected a 16.7 percent foreclosure rate on subprime loans in 2006, which is a 462 percent increase over rates from 2000.

At a recent National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders (NALCAB) press conference on the foreclosure crisis within the Latino community, Rep. Linda Sanchez, of California’s 39th District, stressed the importance of working harder than ever to prevent financial exploitation of low-income communities of color, particularly during these hard economic times. The U.S. unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is the highest it has been in five years, she says.

The foreclosures all around California neighborhoods represent just the “tip of the iceberg,” Sanchez says. “The foreclosure rate we are looking at right now equals the rate of the Great Depression.”

Many Latino and African American homebuyers have been steered into predatory mortgages even though they qualified for cheaper mortgages, Sanchez says. In her district, which covers part of southeastern Los Angeles County, 31 percent of all loans issued between 2005 and 2006 were subprime loans, and over half of the families who received the loans qualified for lower interest rates on their mortgages.

The best way of combating the high foreclosure rate, Sanchez says, is combining new public policy with an education effort that would make low-income communities savvier in financial matters.

Two bills recently passed by Congress, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act and the Neighborhood Stabilization Bill, which intend to address the subprime mortgage crisis and help stabilize local communities, are steps in the right direction, but there’s no quick fix to the foreclosure crisis, Sanchez says.

The legislation, and the recent federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, will secure lending capital for future loans for first time homebuyers, according to Jane Duong, home ownership program manager at MEDA. The requirements of getting these loans may be more stringent in the future, leaving many still vulnerable to predatory lending.

City Treasurer Jose Cisneros, widely praised for spearheading the Bank on San Francisco initiative, which has aimed to assist low-income San Franciscans open their first bank accounts, thinks many of the debt problems in the Latino community are banking-related.

“Individuals would receive their paychecks or benefit checks, go down to the cash checker where there was a line out the door, and pay exorbitant fees just to cash their checks—a service most of us do for free,” Cisneros says. Within the Latino and African American communities in San Francisco, half of all households don’t have bank accounts.

Language access is an issue for many immigrant families, says Bea Stotzer, Chair of NALCAB’s board of directors. Important bank documents should be translated into Spanish, and stronger penalties for predatory lenders and crooked brokers need to be instituted, Stotzer says.

“There is this ideological belief among some Congressmen, and I hate to say this, that poor people are poor because they don’t work hard,” Rep. Sanchez says. “Many poor people are the hardest working people in the world, and they pay more for everything, but Congress continues to pass laws that penalize them and reward more irresponsible [high powered corporations].”

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Via The Wall Street Journal

Hispanic businesses and Spanish-language media, galvanized by the immigration debates of recent years, are sponsoring a bevy of civic engagement and get-out-the-vote efforts in the Washington area.

Some are part of larger national campaigns, spurred both by discussions of immigration policy and by Republican and Democratic interest in recruiting Hispanic voters. The majority of the efforts are nonpartisan and aimed at getting Hispanics to register and show up on Election Day.

The Ayuda Business Coalition runs one such campaign, focusing on Northern Virginia, particularly Prince William County. The nonprofit was formed last year by business owners opposed to the county’s crackdown on illegal immigration, calling it bad for the local economy. It consists of more than 100 local, Hispanic-owned businesses.

Ayuda has set up registration booths at some members’ grocery stores and at soccer matches. It also plans to conduct demonstrations on how to use voting machines and run spots on Spanish-language radio with the tagline, ” Si no votas, no cuentas,” or, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”

José Marinay, the owner of a real estate settlement company in Annapolis, joined the Ayuda coalition last year when he saw sales at his Smart Choice Settlements office in Prince William County plummet. Marinay said he had donated to Democratic campaigns in the past but had not been involved in lobbying or voter mobilization efforts.

“Immigration was having a tremendous effect in Prince William County because nobody wanted to buy there and it was like they were shutting the door down on us,” Marinay said. “There was nothing I could do, and I was trying to find a way to make a difference.”

Both Republicans and Democrats are courting the Hispanic vote. The Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), has been getting its members to register Hispanic voters by phone and on the streets. The Republican National Hispanic Assembly, on behalf of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), plans to hold its own roundtable discussions for Hispanic business owners before the election, emphasizing tax issues. It also plans to host Hispanic happy hours.

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“The Hispanic vote in Virginia could be pivotal,” said Raul “Danny” Vargas, the founder of Herndon marketing company VARCom Solutions and chairman of the assembly. “What you will see is that there are a number of business leaders that are engaged in the political process, whereas they had not been before.”

Hispanic media are also playing a stepped-up role, donating air time and advertising space to get Hispanic voters to the polls. Local newspapers Washington Hispanic and El Tiempo Latino, a publication of The Washington Post Co., are donating ad space to the campaign called ” Ya Es Hora,” or “It’s Time,” run by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Los Angeles.

That campaign, backed nationally by the Spanish-language media giant Univision, has been encouraging immigrants to gain citizenship and vote this year.

Alberto Avendaño, associate publisher and editor in chief of El Tiempo Latino, said the campaign was born out of the demonstrations by immigrants in 2006.

“This year, the community is really energized,” Avendaño said.

The local affiliate of Telemundo is partnering with the nonprofit Voto Latino, which will run public service announcements and give political analysis, said Maria Teresa Petersen, director of the Voto Latino campaign.

The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce plans to launch get-out-the-vote efforts in October to try to mobilize voters through its member chambers, including ones in the District, Rockville, Germantown and Herndon. It is the first time that the chamber, which has also stepped up its lobbying and policy efforts in the past two years, has attempted to mobilize voters, said David Ferreira, vice president of government affairs for the commerce.

“We decided to get involved in this election once we saw that comprehensive immigration [legislation] failed,” he said. “We knew we needed to activate the Hispanic community.”

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Via The Washington Post

With the economy in the grip of a slowdown, American workers are increasingly losing full-time work to part-time employment, and the trend is particularly pronounced among Hispanics, contributing to the tough economic times hitting the nation’s largest minority group.

Gustavo Alvarez, a 33-year-old U.S. citizen who spent most of his life in Argentina, took a part-time job cleaning a six-story Rockville office building in April when he could not find full-time work after being laid off from a Silver Spring construction company.

For Alvarez, that meant fewer hours at about half of the $20 per hour he used to pull in, as well as the loss of benefits and health insurance. He cut back on groceries and money sent home to his wife in Buenos Aires. He struggled to pay his rent and bills. Until three weeks ago, when he found a second part-time job cleaning another office building, his monthly income was about $700.

“When I received my first paycheck that said that in 15 days I had received 300-and-something dollars, I died,” Alvarez said. “I swear to you, I wanted to cry when I saw that check.”

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Full-time work often becomes scarce during an economic slowdown as companies cut back on expenses. A total of 5.3 million Americans who want full-time work held part-time jobs at the end of the second quarter, an increase of about 22 percent from the same period last year, according to the Labor Department.

“That is a robust number,” said Steve Hipple, an economist at the department.

About 3.6 million involuntary part-time workers had their hours cut from full-time because of a slowdown in business. An additional 1.4 million took part-time work because they could not find a full-time job. Specific data on the Washington area was not available.

Hispanics make up a disproportionate number of workers who hold part-time jobs but want full-time work. While they are only about 14 percent of the U.S. labor force, they represent 33 percent of people who shifted from full-time to involuntary part-time work in the year ended June 30. Because more than half of Hispanic workers are immigrants and are more likely to be young and less skilled, they are more susceptible to economic cycles, said Harry J. Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist at the Labor Department.

“Any business that feels pressure to cut costs is going to look at which workers are expendable and, of course, the workers that are usually the most expendable are the least skilled and the most recently hired,” Holzer said. “Immigrants are going to be more than proportionately concentrated there.”

Hispanics also tend to work in industries that have had some of the biggest increases in involuntary part-time jobs over the past year. About 26 percent of these jobs were in construction, 15 percent in wholesale and retail trade, and 11.5 percent in professional and business services, according to the Labor Department.

In the Washington area, the service industry is the biggest employer for immigrants from Latin America, retaining about 33 percent of that workforce, according to an analysis by Audrey Singer, a senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. The study analyzes 2006 Census data, the most recent available.

Ana Margarita Pineda, a 30-year-old immigrant from El Salvador and a single mother, said that about five months ago, her hours were reduced from full-time to about 25 hours a week at the Adams Morgan office of MaidPro, a home-cleaning chain.

“I could not buy new clothes for my daughter, take her out to go to Chuck E. Cheese, go to the beach, do the things that we used to do just one year ago because there is no income like before,” Pineda said.

Pineda said she was laid off last week.

The construction industry employs about 24 percent of Latin American workers in Washington, according to Singer’s analysis.

Job losses in that industry have hit Hispanic workers particularly hard. A report by the Pew Hispanic Center found that the slump in the construction industry was a key factor in a spike in unemployment among Hispanics. The construction industry has also seen the biggest increase over the last year in part-time positions for workers who would like to work full-time, adding some 249,000 part-time jobs, with about 234,000 of those attributed to the housing downturn.

The loss of full-time work is exacerbating other economic problems for Hispanics. Of the 50 people who most recently sought foreclosure counseling from Latino Economic Development Corp. in the District, 22 cited a reduction in income as a reason they needed help, the group said.

“For those who have full-time employment, their hours are being cut. For those who have part-time employment, they are being let go,” said Wendy Alvarenga, a senior housing counselor with the group. “It’s affecting their mortgage payments because they are not making what they were once making.”

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The cost of living, led by the soaring cost of gasoline and food, is rising at the fastest rate since the recession of the early 1990s, the government said on Thursday, handing a de facto pay cut to the American worker.

The report, from the Labor Department, offered quantitative proof of what Americans have been feeling for months: almost everything costs more, even as they have less money to pay for it.

Prices of a wide range of common products in the Consumer Price Index were 5.6 percent higher last month than they were in July 2007, the sharpest annual increase since January 1991.

Much of the increase has been driven by the immense run-up in gasoline prices. But food, beverage and transportation costs are also significantly higher than they were a year ago.

The higher prices have made many workers’ wages effectively worth less.

In July, rank-and-file workers — those in production or nonsupervisory roles — earned 3.1 percent less than they did a year ago, after adjusting for the rising cost of living.

“Any way you slice it, incomes aren’t keeping up with the inflation rate,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the trading and research firm MKM Partners.

It was the 10th consecutive month that the weekly average salary had failed to keep pace with inflation, according to statistics from the Labor Department.

Employers are doling out modest wage increases, but not nearly enough to compensate for more expensive food and fuel.

“People see it and they feel it on a daily basis,” Mr. Darda said. “If it’s gasoline or food, that’s visible inflation, and the stuff that households need the most and depend on.”

Prices have not risen at the speed they did during the oil crises of the 1970s, and financial policy makers have said they do not expect a repeat of the so-called wage-price spiral that led to double-digit inflation rates during that decade.

But with home values falling and the stock market in a slump, Americans are finding it more and more difficult to pay for basic purchases. Credit card debt has spiraled upward, home foreclosures are rising, and banks have become more guarded in giving out loans and mortgages.

Social Security recipients are now on track to receive the highest cost-of-living increase since 1982.

The Federal Reserve can try to choke off inflation by raising its benchmark interest rate. But such a move would also make it harder for businesses, banks and households to obtain loans, which could cause a further slowdown in the economy. Investors now expect the Fed to hold rates steady until at least the end of the year.

Some economists have argued that as Americans cut back their spending, demand for products and services will drop, forcing businesses to lower their prices.

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