Nancy White showed up at last week’s Marion County tax sale to ask how she could keep from losing her Eastside home.Carrying a cloth bag that held her home’s tax records, White finally found someone to talk to: a chief deputy in the county treasurer’s office.She handed him her property tax bill, and he gave her some good news. She had one year from the date of the auction to pay off $1,716 in overdue taxes, with interest.“I can pay it off in a year,” she said. “This is the only house I have ever owned and the only house I ever will own. To lose it in a year would be too much.”White is among the growing ranks of unfortunate home buyers coming face to face with foreclosure, tax sales and other ways of dealing with those who can’t afford to own their houses.In Marion County alone, last week’s annual tax sale put 3,900 delinquent properties up for auction, most of them houses. Through October of this year, 8,700 other foreclosed-on properties, most of them homes, have gone through the monthly sheriff’s sale. That’s about 1,400 more than during the first 10 months of 2007, which was a record year for foreclosure sales in the county.“Every year has been an increase for the last umpteen years,” said Sgt. Paula Lundin, who handles foreclosure sales for the sheriff. “A lot of these properties are mortgaged for more than the value.”White, a computer program systems analyst who stopped working after two serious surgeries, bought her home in the 600 block of North Dearborn Street, east of Woodruff Place, about two years ago, after renting it for about a decade.She would have been able to afford it, she said, if not for high medical bills, major home repairs that came up and a jump in property taxes for two straight years.“Taxes almost quadrupled,” she said, putting payment beyond the reach of her income, which is mostly Social Security disability pay.White doubts that her house is worth the $38,000 the city assessed it for. It sits next to a burned-out house that hasn’t been lived in for years. And the repairs are so substantial that White has temporarily moved out to live in a friend’s attic.Still, unlike hundreds in the county who have given up on homeownership, she’s determined not to. She said she’ll use problem-solving skills learned as a systems analyst and as a former employee in the Center Township trustee’s office to try to make stopgap repairs on her old house and pay off the taxes.“They’re going to have to run over me with a Mack truck to take my house,” she said.Jeff Swiatek