GARY | On a hot Friday in late June, Sandra Wright furiously swept the brown-painted kitchen floor of her three-bedroom home on West 43rd Avenue.

"We have just one hour," she said. "One hour to go and we have to be out of here. I don't know how we're going to make it."

(A primer on foreclosure. Learn what to expect and links for help.)

As her 17-year-old son and an 8-year-old grandson dragged mattresses, furniture, and odds-and-ends out to a U-Haul truck, Wright kept looking nervously to the front door.

Her landlord had been served with a foreclosure notice in March and the home had been sold to a bank at the June Sheriff's sale.

The bank gave Wright only one option -- to get out.

Wright's predicament is one being repeated across Northwest Indiana and Chicago's south suburbs, as banks foreclose on landlords and tenants find eviction notices in their mailboxes.

They are the unseen victims of America's foreclosure crisis, often kicked out with little warning. In some cases, they are victimized beforehand by unscrupulous landlords.

"Unfortunately, it's mostly the single-family homes that investors tried to get money out of them and then moved on and the tenant got sandwiched in between," said Cynthia Powers of Century 21 Powers Realty Inc.

Her realty firm in Gary often markets foreclosed homes for banks.

Some banks offer renters cash to turn over the keys and leave them an undamaged house, she said. It's called "cash for keys" in industry parlance.

Some banks just kick the tenant out with no compensation. So far in Northwest Indiana, banks have not been allowing tenants to pay rent and stay in the homes.

In Wright's case, the bank put up $1,000 to entice her to hand over the keys to the house within a week. It was just enough for Wright to rent the truck and secure another rental home in another neighborhood.

Powers has seen cases where landlords have continued collecting rent after they stopped paying the mortgage. Some will collect right up to the day of an eviction, even though they have ceased to own the home.

"We are willing to shed some light on it, because I've seen tenants hurt too many times," Powers said.

The former landlord of Sandra Wright's Gary home, Kimberly Hill, had three properties put to sheriff's sale in May and June after defaulting on mortgages, according to Civil Division records. A total of $178,615 was owed on the homes.

Wright did not accuse Hill of any unscrupulous behavior. In fact, she said Hill simply stopped collecting rent months before the first foreclosure summons arrived at the home.

But Wright said she would have been caught totally unaware if she hadn't had the curiosity to open the original foreclosure summons in December, which had Hill's name on it.

Wright then began searching for a way to stay in the home.

In January, she paid an Internet site that advertised "free government grants" $19.97 to find her a grant or mortgage to buy the home. She never heard back.

She was hopeful of staying in the home until just a week before her move, thinking maybe the bank would accept rent payments. It wouldn't.

On her moving day, Wright still didn't know how she would come up with the $220 NIPSCO deposit to get the gas and electric turned on at their new place.

And there were other worries as well. Wright's daughter, Shamala, was helping her mother clean the house inside while trying to keep watch on her own children outside.

Shamala pointed out it would be the children's second move in a year-and-a-half. They had friends in the neighborhood and at Glen Park Academy, the public elementary school.

"They don't like it, because it was unexpected," Shamala said. "They just got used to it here. They made friends and now they have to make friends all over again."