HOMESTEAD, Fla. – Seventeen years after Hurricane Andrew leveled much of southern Miami-Dade County, a different kind of storm is devastating households here: foreclosures.

In certain ZIP codes in places like Homestead and Florida City, around 25 percent of the homes are in one stage of foreclosure or another. Countless others were built by developers and sit vacant in ghostly subdivisions, with not a buyer in sight.

In the days after Andrew, then-Dade County Emergency Management Director Kate Hale famously said on national TV: "Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?"

The same could be asked now, in this new disaster. People in south Miami-Dade — just like people in foreclosure-strewn cities across the nation — are wondering: How did we get here?

And, what's next?

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UNDERWATER AND ANGRY

Here's what Jose Reina thought in 2006, when he bought the two-story, 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath home in a subdivision called The Oasis in Homestead: "I should buy right now. The market in Florida has been going nothing but up."

Here's what Reina thinks in 2009: "I think I'd rather sell and go rent somewhere. For the amount that I pay here, I could rent a mansion somewhere."

Reina, who is 31 and works as a police officer in another city, knows he can't simply sell. He paid $352,000 for his house, then spent months landscaping the front yard, laying sod and solar safety lights and little terra cotta vases for decoration near the walkway.

"See that house over there," he points to a gray house that is nearly identical to his. "It was foreclosed on last month. The bank is trying to sell it for $147,000."

He knows it will be years, maybe decades, until he can sell his home for what he paid for it. He's tried talking to his bank about adjusting the mortgage, but they said no.

Meanwhile, he's concerned about all the empty houses around him. Some renters moved in down the street and he wonders if crime will follow.

"I also pay $130 a month in maintenance fees, and not even the front security gate works."

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"IT'S TERRIFYING"

Cathee Cotton once sold dreams.

Now she's watching nightmares.

Just in the past month, here's what the 30-year real estate veteran has seen:

• A family who was evicted from their rental house because their landlord was foreclosed on.

• A home for a prospective buyer that was occupied by two families squatting inside — with five little children.

• A propane tank and men's boots inside an empty home.

"Either it was a meth lab or someone was living without electricity," she says now, eyes wide at the memory.

It's different from 2006. Cotton remembers standing in the driveways of $300,000 homes and watching as buyers signed purchase contracts right on car hoods. She recalls bidding wars for modest ranch homes.

These days, those same homes are vacant and are the ones where everything — including the kitchen cabinets and copper wiring — have been stripped by vandals. And there's the places like the one on the corner of her own street, where the owners fled in the middle of the night.

They left behind a pack of dogs.

She thinks things will get worse in the coming months — worse than when Andrew blew everything away. At least then, she says, help arrived from the rest of Florida and the nation.

"Where is the rescue going to come from now?" she asks. "Everyone is hurting just like we are."

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A FUTURE IN THE DIRT

Dean Richardson steers a mud-covered golf cart through rows of tropical trees, pointing out how to tell an Alexander Palm from a Christmas Palm. Richardson, who has farmed his 10-acre patch of land in south Miami-Dade County for 27 years, was a beneficiary of the area's real estate boom.

These days, he's a victim of the bust.

For years, Richardson sold his trees to landscapers and developers who planted those swaying slices of the tropics in shopping malls, office parks and the front yards of new homes across the country.

But in mid-2008, Richardson noticed a slowdown in orders. Then business stopped altogether. Although many farmers had sold their land to developers and made a killing years earlier, it was too late for Richardson.

"It was like someone had turned the switch off," he said. He laid off eight of his nine full-time employees and worried about the future. In late August, a friend called. "Have you thought about growing organic vegetables on your property?" the friend asked.

"I am now," Richardson replied.

He decided to plant the unusual: purple carrots, black radishes, funky beets. He's making enough to hang on.

Richardson still grows his palms — he just got an order for 66 to be placed in a new office building — but he knows the organic vegetables may be just the thing to ride out this downturn. He still hopes that South Florida will boom again.

"I think it will come back," he said. "Let's face it. This is March, and we're in short sleeves. It's winter, and you're not going to have this in New York, ever."

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BLOGGING THE TRUTH

At 5:30 a.m. everyday, Alan Farago sits at his computer and tries to draw parallels between the housing crisis in Miami-Dade County and what's going on in Wall Street boardrooms and White House conference rooms.

Farago, who lives in Coral Gables — a suburb some 20 miles north of Homestead — co-writes a popular blog called Eye on Miami. Since 2006, he's rifled through public documents and detailed much of the mortgage fraud, banking shenanigans and corruption that preceded the area's economic meltdown.

"I ask myself: this is really depressing stuff. Who's going to want to read this?" he says. "Then I tell myself, someone has to lay out what has happened."

Farago moved to the Miami area from the Florida Keys just days before Andrew hit. He'd always been interested in the Everglades and Biscayne National Park — two national reserves that abut the southern part of the county — so during the rebuilding in the wake of Andrew, Farago went to planning meetings and spoke out against policies that encouraged suburban sprawl. He volunteered for a half-dozen responsible growth groups and was once involved with the state chapter of the Sierra Club, fighting to save the delicate Everglades wetlands.

His advice was ignored and thousands of acres were developed. For years, Miami-Dade County's entire economy was dependent on growth — growth that was dependent on a never-ending supply of sunshine, easy credit and new residents.

Now, Farago says, the entire country is paying the price.

"The whole of Miami's establishment prospered by the easy conversion of cheap land into suburban sprawl," he says. "It's the development pattern of South Florida that brought down the economy."

Farago places the blame of the housing crisis not only on banks, but on developers, lobbyists and — most of all — local officials who approved the projects in the first place.

"Florida's a place where the gears of the development machine were all perfected."

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MAYOR: I TOLD YOU SO

Since October, 2,257 properties have gone into foreclosure in the city of Homestead.

Mayor Lynda Bell is quick to say that she saw the crisis brewing years ago when a parade of developers marched into the City Council's chambers, asking them to approve dozens of projects.

"After Hurricane Andrew, we had 10 years of financial famine," says Bell. "When we started to get food — money — we became gluttons. We didn't want to say no to anything that would impede the tax base. We had suffered so much."

Bell says she opposed most of the multifamily town home projects because she felt that lower-income families could never afford them. She did approve the single-family dwellings. Eventually, she questioned how, in a city where the median income was around $27,000 in 2007, the median home price was over $300,000.

The answer emerged. "Speculators," she says, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. "Speculators drove up the housing market."

Now many of those speculators are forced to rent their properties, which drives home values down even more. Many older properties that were bought and flipped two or three times are now run down and boarded up.

Bell says she's hopeful for Homestead's future, which includes $3 million of federal stimulus money for the community of 57,000 people. The city will use the funds to buy and rehabilitate rental properties for low-income families, demolish damaged houses and provide down-payment help for single-family home buyers.

The mayor says one other thing was recently approved by city officials, in hopes of reversing the damage done by the housing boom: a building moratorium on all new construction.