Saving a veteran's dream home and helping protect the neighborhood that surrounds it.

Keith and Vickki Jordan's money woes started the way they do for many couples--with a job loss--and soon overtook them in a perfect storm of shrinking income and rising expenses that almost cost them their Jacksonville home.

Not long after Vickki lost her job, Keith, a corrections officer since 1997, took two hits to his paycheck. His wages were suddenly being garnished due to student loan debt, and then the state began taking 3 percent of his pay to put into his retirement plan. Meanwhile, the couple's homeowner's insurance rates skyrocketed, taking their total monthly house payment from less than $730 a month to more than $1,000.

Since purchasing their home in 1999, Keith, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm, and Vickki, a private duty certified nursing assistant, had always made their mortgage payments, but soon they found themselves behind on their VA loan and being threatened with foreclosure by the lender.

The Jordans' story is a familiar one to the dozens of legal aid attorneys around Florida who work in the trenches trying to save their clients' homes.

Housing and family law are the two most common types of legal aid cases, with each accounting for about 30 percent of the total cases handled by Florida legal aid organizations each year. Funding from The Florida Bar Foundation, down 78 percent since 2010 due to drastically reduced revenue from Florida's IOTA program, is increasingly inadequate to support the work of legal aid and pro bono attorneys who defend foreclosures in court, although it still plays an important role.

And while foreclosures are down in Florida as they are in most states, the Sunshine State still leads the nation, according to a report released in February by CoreLogic showing that 118,000 Florida homes were repossessed by lenders in 2014. That's more than four times the number in Ohio, which ranked second in repossessions last year among the states with a judicial foreclosure process. Florida's seriously delinquent loan rate of about 8 percent is double the national rate, according to the report.

Several studies have shown that a foreclosure diminishes the value of the surrounding homes by about 9 percent. And a 2006 City of Chicago study found that a one percentage-point increase in the foreclosure rate can be expected to increase violent crimes in a census tract by 2.33 percent.

St. Johns County Attorney Patrick McCormack said he looks at legal aid as "preventive medicine" that reduces...