Foreclosures on homes are on the rise for everybody, but Latinos are showing a more steep decline in home ownership compared to other groups across the nation.

The Pew Hispanic Center completed a study recently that showed a significant gap in Latino homeownership, compared to that of Anglos. The study found that in 2008, just under half (48.9 percent, to be exact) of Latinos owned homes --- compared to 74.9 percent for white people.

Compared to other racial or ethnic minorities, 59.1 percent of Asians and 47.5 percent of African-American people were homeowners.

A complicating factor is that Latinos, when they do manage to arrange for financing to enable them to purchase a house, can wind up borrowing money in the subprime market. That means their loans get hit with higher interest rates.

The Pew study also found that 27.6 percent of loans to Latinos were in the higher-priced market, compared to only 10.5 percent of white people who fell into that category.

The end result, according to the study, is an interest rate that can be about 2.5 percent higher than that received by someone who was able to borrow money through conventional finance methods.

It was along the line of trying to improve this situation that the Plazas Communitaria of East Chicago worked with the Indiana LULAC Women's Committee to hold a forum earlier this month to educate Latinos in and around Hammond and East Chicago what they need to do in order to refinance their home loans to get a more affordable payment.

The two groups had officials with the Hammond Housing Authority on hand, along with officials of various local banks, all in an attempt to help people avoid the possibility of foreclosure on their homes due to current economic struggles.

The Pew study found that the bulk of problems with foreclosures are taking place in California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida, although a second-string of foreclosures in Midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois also exists.

Yet neither Lake County, Ind., nor any of the Illinois counties that comprise the Chicago area are among the 33 counties in the United States when it comes to having foreclosure rates of 5 percent or higher. In fact, the Pew study found only Cook County last year had a foreclosure rate higher than the national average of 1.8 percent.

The highest foreclosure rate in the United States was Lee County, Fla., where the rate for 2008 was 12 percent.