Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. eliminated 850 mortgage jobs, the firm’s second cut in two weeks, and National City Corp. reduced staff by 1,300 as a new report said American homeowners facing foreclosure rose to a record.

Lehman, the biggest underwriter of American bonds backed by home loans, and National City, Ohio’s largest bank, announced the dismissals less than a day after 900 people were cut by Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest American mortgage firm. At H&R Block Inc., shareholders elected dissident directors led by hedge-fund manager Richard Breeden yesterday after the company said the sale of its money-losing subprime mortgage unit may collapse.

The pace of firings has picked up as home sales faltered and investors who buy mortgages, concerned about rising defaults, stopped bidding. Late payments by “subprime” borrowers with the worst credit records surged to one out of every seven loans in the second quarter, the Mortgage Bankers Association said yesterday. With bankers reluctant to finance home lenders, more than 100 have sought buyers or halted operations since the start of 2006.

“We found ourselves in the midst of a subprime meltdown,” the chief executive officer of H&R Block, Mark Ernst, said after yesterday’s shareholder vote, in which Mr. Breeden assailed the company for not getting out of mortgage lending faster. “Do I wish that we had found a way to exit the subprime business sooner? Absolutely. But I can’t do much about that today.”

The bulk of the firings at Lehman will be at Aurora Loan Services LLC, the American unit that makes so-called Alt-A loans to borrowers whose credit ratings fall just short of standards for regular prime mortgages.