Drive down the central highway of Woodbridge, past the deserted car parks and boarded-up pawn shops, and you will see advertisements for Buyin48hours.com. “We buy houses, we take over payments,” the flyers say. Turn into the residential cul-de-sacs and signs reading “Bank-owned home” pepper the front gardens.

Once a prosperous commuter town, Woodbridge is at the heart of America’s credit crunch. Months before the financial storm hit New York, levelling Lehman Brothers and AIG, it swept through this northern Virginia suburb, battering its middle-class inhabitants. “I lost my home in February,” Iris Salamanca, 40, said. “The bank gave me a 100 per cent loan for $250,000 [£136,000] four years ago. I was only earning $10,000.” Sitting in an empty Laundromat, one of the few businesses left in the local mall, she smiled as she remembered the lure of easy credit and oversized dreams.

“It was my first house,” she said. “I was so excited when the bank lent me money that I didn’t think about meeting the payments.”

Now there is anger in Woodbridge at events in Washington — particularly the $700 billion plan to bail out the banks. Ms Salamanca, a single mother, who lives in a shabby, two-bedroom flat with her two teenage sons, said:

“I don’t see how it will help me. Politicians will look after their own.”

Rosita Juslingno, 52, a Mexican immigrant who works at the Laundromat where Ms Salamanca does her boys’ washing, said: “No one’s explained what’s happening. Who are they injecting money to? I just know that my customers have fallen from forty in the morning to just two.”

She pointed to a line of empty washing machines. “We’re close to closing. Are they going to bail me out?”

High unemployment and falling house prices have transformed Virginia from a Republican stronghold into an election battleground. In Northern Virginia, which has historically voted Democrat, the value of a home dropped last year by $110,900, or 25 per cent.Many here agree, at least in the abstract, that a huge bailout might be better than another Great Depression. But they sensed that any deal would not be for them.

“It’s politicking,” Dan Dicks, 55, said as he walked to his job at the local Foot Locker shoe shop. “Rich folk helping out rich folk. That’s all this is.”

Nirmal Singh, 42, a taxi driver, said. “Banks gave people what they could not afford and now we’re having to bail them out. If I was a small business and borrowed over my head, I’d deserve to go under.”

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