http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/homes/economy.html By RUSSELL GRANTHAM Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer Rosalind Burton's $60,000-plus job at ITrainonline.com disappeared in March. The 39-year-old programmer/analyst's comfortable life_style_ soon began to disintegrate. She turned in her Nissan Pathfinder when the lease expired. She now takes MARTA. She can't afford the private school tuition for her 5-year-old son. We went from a life_style_ where he had his soccer lessons and swim lessons to where we just go to the park now, she says. Whatever is free is pretty much what we do. She gave up on her dream to buy a three-bedroom home in Roswell. She and her family call a one-bedroom, 900-square-foot Atlanta condo home. And she's still unemployed. Multiply Burton's job loss and the collateral damage 28,000 times, and you've got a picture of why reinforcements are needed this year for metro Atlanta's once-impregnable real estate market. About 28,000 people lost jobs in metro Atlanta in the 12 months through June. The casualties keep piling up. Against a backdrop of rising mortgage delinquencies and shrinking stock portfolios, job prospects and corporate relocation budgets, metro Atlanta's home sales this year have been an anemic sequel to last year's double-digit growth. In the year preceding the Nasdaq's spring 2000 collapse, home sales in metro Atlanta rose 17 percent, according to Smart Numbers, a real estate analysis firm. A then-record 128,863 homes changed owners in the 20-county region. But then the Nasdaq market plunged, losing more than half its value, and other indexes fell by lesser amounts, affecting many Atlantans' jobs and home-buying plans. Sales of existing homes in metro Atlanta fell 0.6 percent