SAN DIEGO -- New U.S. Census figures released Tuesday showed that San Diego County lost nearly 22,000 homeowners since 2005.

The loss erased two years of homeownership gains that lifted the county's percentage of homeowners to its highest level in nearly two decades, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Among those remaining homeowners, nearly 105,000 of all households in the county with a mortgage spent at least half their pre-tax pay on housing last year, the newspaper reported.

That number represents about a quarter of all households in the county with a mortgage.

Four years ago, 15 percent of households in the county with a mortgage were spending at least half their pre-tax pay on housing, according to the Union-Tribune.

"There is still a tremendous number of people who are financially exposed, and the census numbers suggest that maybe there has been only a small dent made in the number of people who've had to get out of their housing," demographer Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California told the newspaper. "A decline of 20,000 (plus) homeowners over two years is a big decline, but how many more people are seriously at risk?"

The Census report comes from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which sampled 3 million randomly selected U.S. households throughout 2007.