Homeowners and consumer advocates urged a state Senate committee to help save foreclosure victims’ homes and improve lending standards on Tuesday, the same day a study showed that foreclosure filings in California almost quadrupled in July compared with a year ago.

“Unless I can figure out a way to get out of this mess, I’m going to lose the home I’ve lived in for almost 40 years,” said Dorothy Hicks, an Oakland resident, during public comments at a hearing on the subprime mortgage crisis. Hicks refinanced her home twice to get cash for a new business and ended up with payments far beyond her means, she said. The adjustable-rate payments continue to go up.

The Senate hearing comes at a time when home prices are falling and adjustable loans are resetting to higher rates, causing millions of homeowners nationwide to start missing mortgage payments. As defaults and delinquencies have mounted, dozen of subprime lenders have closed their doors. Most recently, mortgage woes have spread to jumbo mortgages (those above $417,000) for people with good credit, which have become more expensive and harder to get.

RealtyTrac.com, an Irvine company that sells foreclosure data, said 39,013 California households, 1 of every 333 in the state, received a notice in July that it was in some stage of foreclosure. That was 289 percent higher than in July 2006 and gave the state the fourth-highest foreclosure rate in the nation, after Nevada, Georgia and Michigan.

Of those, 27,071 homes received notices of default, indicating that they were behind on mortgage payments; 7,498 received notices of trustee sale, meaning that their homes were scheduled for foreclosure auctions; and 4,400 became “real- estate owned” properties that reverted to the lender after auction.

In Sacramento, officials from consumer groups told the Senate Banking, Finance and Insurance Committee that California must address the foreclosure crisis caused by a raft of subprime loans to people with poor credit. Many of those loans had low initial rates that are now resetting into unaffordable amounts at the same time that housing prices have started to decline in many areas of the state.

“There are a number of concrete steps that California can take today to minimize foreclosures and stabilize housing markets, including providing emergency funding for foreclosure prevention counseling and legal assistance, establishing a strong monitoring system for loan modifications, and a target refinance product to help borrowers refinance loans,” said Paul Leonard, California director of the Center for Responsible Lending, in prepared testimony.

“Today illustrated that we’re looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems of foreclosures,” said Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden (San Joaquin County), committee chairman, in an interview after the hearing. “In October, $50 billion in loans (will) reset as part of $1 trillion over the next year and a half.”

The committee also heard testimony from mortgage lenders. “We found out that lenders do have options to be able to help people who are in trouble to restructure their loans,” Machado said.

Machado has two bills pending that would help curb future loan abuses, he said. One would require lenders to strengthen underwriting standards and improve consumer disclosures. The other would protect appraisers from being pressured by lenders to value homes artificially high.

Machado said legislation to help people already facing foreclosure is another possibility, but meanwhile the Legislature and regulatory agencies will urge lenders and servicers to help homeowners with troubled loans.

“The state has an obligation to use its bully pulpit to encourage lenders to be more aggressive in their outreach and their workouts with borrowers who are in trouble,” he said.

Meanwhile, foreclosures are mounting dramatically.

“In California we had a lot of people overextend themselves to buy houses they really couldn’t afford,” said Rick Sharga, vice president of marketing at RealtyTrac. “Home prices accelerated so rapidly that it priced most people out of the market using traditional financing, (so) they used very high-risk loans. When you have the combination of stagnant or decreasing home prices and sales, combined with these loans resetting (to higher monthly payments), you have the kind of problem we have now.”

In the Bay Area, foreclosures were up significantly in July compared with a year ago, RealtyTrac said. The most-affected county, Contra Costa, saw 1,271 homeowners receive notices that they were behind on their mortgages, 649 receive notices their properties would be auctioned and 389 lose their properties to foreclosures. The 2,309 total foreclosure notices in Contra Costa was up 466 percent from last July.

Nationwide, foreclosure filings almost doubled to 179,599 total, RealtyTrac said.