I give her a call, and we meet the next day. We meet in a Mexican restaurant Bertolano co-owns. In addition to her work as a loan specialist and restaurateur, she also works as a legal assistant for a bankruptcy lawyer. Bertolano, who tells me to call her Vienna, is a petite Filipina in her midfifties with a slight accent. “Vallejo,” she tells me, “was going to be the new Silicon Valley. It was a thriving market. People could buy investment homes here and see them go up 30 percent right away. When the bubble burst in late ’06, middle- and lower-income buyers who could barely afford $1,500 a month in rent were stuck with $350,000 homes they’d bought with no money down. In 2005 there were never houses here for less than $300,000. Now there are over 2,000 houses selling in Solano County for less than $100,000, many of them for around $35,000. The only people buying them are investors. And it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be bleak.”