By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN


MANTECA, California - As the classified ads put it, everything must go. Socks. Christmas ornaments. Microwave ovens. Three-year-old Marita Duarte’s tricycle was sold by her mother, Beatriz, to a stranger for $3 even as her daughter was riding it.

On Mission Ridge Drive and other avenues, lanes and ways in this formerly booming community, even birthday celebrations must go.“It was no money, no birthday,”said Ms.Duarte, who lost her job as a floral designer a few months ago. The family commemorated Marita’s third birthday this fall without presents, the occasion marked by a small cake with Cinderella on the vanilla frosting.

An eternity ago, people in this city in northern San Joaquin County braved four-hour round-trip commutes to the San Francisco Bay Area for a toehold on the American dream. Today, Manteca’s lawns and driveways are storefronts of the new garage-sale economy - the telltale yellow signs plastered in the rear windows of parked cars Friday through Sunday directing traffic to yet another sale, yet another family facing economic hardship and home foreclosure.

“You can get great deals,” said Sharrell Johnson, 32, who was scouting for toys recently amid boxes of tools and DVDs and forests of little skirts and shirts.“Sad to say, you’re finding really good things. Because everybody’s losing their homes.”

The garage-sale economy is flourishing here and in many other regions of the United States, so much so that some cities are cracking down. With more residents trying to increase their income, the city of Weymouth, Massachusetts, limited yard sales to just three a year per address.

The sales are part of the once-underground“thrift economy,”as a team of Brigham Young University sociologists have called it, which includes thrift stores and pawn shops.

“This is the perfect storm for garage sales,”said Gregg Kettles, a visiting professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who studies outdoor commerce.“We’re coming off a 20-year boom in which consumers filled ever-bigger houses. Now people need cash because of the bust.”

And so the garages and yards of Manteca offer a quick course in kitchen-table economics each weekend.

When life’s daily items and keepsakes are laid out for sale on a collapsible table, sentiment is the first thing to go.“The cash helps a lot,” Constantino Gonzalez, Ms.Duarte’s neighbor, said of the family’s second sale in two weeks, in which he and his wife, Julia, were reluctantly selling their children’s inflatable bounce house for $650, with pump.

Since losing his construction job, Mr.Gonzalez, 43, has been economizing, disconnecting the family’s Internet and longdistance telephone service, and barely using his truck and the Jeep, strewn with leaves in the driveway. He has taken to picking up his children from school on his bicycle, with 6-year-old Daniel on the handlebars, cushioned by a terry-cloth towel.

The inflatable bounce house is the children’s favorite toy, but the family’s $1,800 mortgage payment is coming. So it sits propped up in its bright blue case, awaiting buyers, many of them desperate themselves. Customers are searching for bargains on necessities so they might chip away at the rent, the truck payment, the remodeling bill on the credit card.

“We need to eat,” Mr.Gonzalez tells his children about selling off their toys.

Manteca lies at an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis, with median home values having fallen by nearly half since 2006, from $440,000 to the current $225,000. In San Joaquin County, Moody’s has estimated that more than 1 in 10 houses with mortgages have a payment that is more than 30 days late. Unemployment rates have increased by a third, from 7.6 percent in September 2007 to 10. 2 percent this fall, said Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California.

On Widgeon Way, the garage of Paul Farnsworth, 65, was an eclectic assortment of artificial flowers, cookie jars, decanters, spotlights, radar detectors, a Dirt Devil vacuum.

Mr.Farnsworth’s recent garage sales supplement his income as a manager for a beverage distributor, which pays about half of what he made as an apricot and cherry farmer in nearby Tracy. (He was laid off when the farm was sold.) Neither he nor his wife Ann, a beautician, can afford to retire.

He has resorted to holding garage sales“to help make payments on a house that’s worth less than what I owe,”he said.