Tamika Shears says she never missed a rent payment, but she was still forced out of her home.

Her situation reflects a growing number of renters facing eviction because of the widening foreclosure crisis gripping Charlotte along with the rest of the nation.

Shears and her two children had lived in a four-bedroom house in northwest Charlotte for more than a year when their landlord lost the house to foreclosure.

“My first thought was, ’Where are we going to go?”’ she recalled.

The Charlotte Observer reported that homeowners displaced by foreclosures have received much attention. But legal and housing experts estimate at least one of every four homes in foreclosure in the Charlotte area is non-owner occupied.

Renters were similarly punished during the mortgage industry meltdown in the early 1990s, but this time problems are far more widespread, said Judith Liben, a lawyer with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. She testified before Congress last year about the issue.

“It’s like you broke a dam,” Liben said.

The impact is swift. Often, evicted renters can’t scrape together hundreds of dollars on short notice needed for first month’s rent and security deposit for a new place. And the vacant houses they leave behind often become magnets for vandalism, drugs and other crime.

Mecklenburg County has been hit harder than any other N.C. county in the mortgage crisis. Between 2000 and 2007, a city study found, the number of foreclosure filings jumped to 7,943 — an increase of more than 200 percent.

The county is on pace for 9,000 foreclosure filings in 2008, said Stanley Watkins, director of Charlotte’s neighborhood development office. About half of those will result in the loss of a home.

Local officials say they haven’t studied how many foreclosures involve rental properties.

But RealtyTrac, a national database of foreclosure activity, reports 29 percent of properties in foreclosure in Mecklenburg are either rentals or vacant. About 28 percent of homes in foreclosure in North Carolina and 33 percent nationwide are not owner-occupied, the database says.

Housing and legal experts said those numbers could be higher in Charlotte because renters in urban areas tend to be affected more than those in rural areas.

In many cases, the landlords are real-estate speculators who bought houses in starter-home subdivisions, Watkins said.

“They bought houses relatively cheap, tried to flip them and got caught” by the mortgage crisis, he said.