I wasn’t around at the time, but they tell me that during the Great Depression, good neighbors often showed up to help evicted people move their belongings back into their homes. As important as such solidarity action is (you men and women with good backs prepare to move into action) something has to be done soon to compel the political establishment to bring some relief for the individuals and families facing the possibility of being rendered homeless.

For one out of every 281 families or individuals in metropolitan area around Atlanta, the coming of August raised the possibility of losing their homes. That month over 5,000 properties entered some stage of foreclosure, most of them because their owners couldn’t meet their mortgage payments. The August Atlanta area foreclosure rate was up 36 percent over July, three times the national average and the second highest in the country for major urban centers—behind Dallas.

According to RealtyTrac, in the city of Atlanta itself, one out of every 70 homes faces some stage of foreclosure. The startling Atlanta numbers – an alarming statistic in an economic sense, 281 tragedies in human terms – are a dramatic illustration of the national epidemic of people – mostly working people - losing their houses.

The collapsing of the nation’s housing market now underway is wrecking havoc on our way of life. Whether the burst of the “housing bubble” results in a “soft” or “hard” landing is really immaterial to those facing financial ruin. And the losses are not restricted to major urban centers.

By the end of summer, one of every 66 household in Greeley, Colorado, was in some stage of foreclosure. Colorado has the country’s highest state foreclosure rate, with one new foreclosure filing for every 301 households. The foreclosure rate there rose 60 percent in August over July.

Three factors are being cited for the rash of foreclosures now expected to quicken over the coming months: production layoffs, the undermining of pension plans, and the practices of banks and other mortgage lenders. Principal among these latter factors are adjustable mortgage rates (ARMs) and various other forms of exotic lending schemes designed to cash in on the recently-concluded housing boom and to take advantage of people denied usual standard rate mortgages. Such loans have initially low rates, but later increase.

About $2 trillion in adjustable rate mortgages are scheduled to reset at higher rates from the beginning of 2006 to the end of 2008. Adjusted upward by an average of 2.5 percentage points, the interest payments by holders of such mortgages would be $50 billion higher in 2009 than they are today, according to the Oct. 1 New York Times.

"When these option ARMs reset to market rate interest, a first time homebuyer's payment could almost double,” ForeclosureS.com President Alexis McGee wrote recently on the company’s website. “On top of that, there has been a significant drop in home values in that market. The owners can't make their new payment, and they can't sell in a market overloaded with unsold homes."

"We saw a drop in California foreclosures in the west in July, but that's not going to last," wrote McGee. "You could say that this summer is the calm before the storm." As of Sept. 11, there were 44,683 properties in some stage of foreclosure in California, and, wrote McGee, “again, these exotic mortgages are a major factor.”

Over half of the home loans taken out by African Americans last year were of this type. The rate for Latinos was nearly that high and nearly three times as many loans to Asians were sub-prime in 2005 compared to 2004.

"ARMs are a ticking time bomb," Brad Geisen, president and chief executive of Foreclosure.com, recently told the Chicago Tribune. "Through 2006 and 2007, I'm pretty sure we'll see a high volume of foreclosures." The overheated housing market, relatively low interest rates and the use of these kinds of creative lending practices, contributed to a significant increase in home ownership by African Americans, Latinos and Asians.  Now, disproportionately, those communities are feeling the negative results of the market chilling.

Across the nation, the biggest rates of home foreclosures are to be found in places where African Americans and Latinos are concentrated. "African Americans and Latinos are paying a premium for home loans because of the color of their skin." Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau, told MSNBC.com.

In August The Charlotte Observer reported African Americans borrowing from 25 of the nation's largest lenders were four times more likely than whites to pay high rates, and that black people with incomes above $100,000 a year were charged high rates more often than whites with incomes below $40,000. The trend of rising foreclosures within the African American community has already begun to erode home ownership gains, says Marc H. Morial, president and CEO the National Urban League. African American homeownership actually decreased by one percent in 2005.

In Chicago, foreclosure filings tripled between 1993 and 2005. Neighborhoods that are at least 88 percent Latino and/or African American represent about two-thirds of all home foreclosures in the city. Citing these figures, Dr. Manning Marable, director of the Center for Contemporary Black Politics at Columbia University, has observed that “ Home and business ownership create the equity to pay for children’s college educations, as well as to pass down to successive generations. Tragically, when the majority of black Baby Boomers – people born between 1946 and 1964 – die, they will bequeath debt to their children and grandchildren, or at best only several thousand dollars in savings. Structural racism is the cause of all this.”

According to Dr. Marable, “Without wealth, a home, or a retirement account, millions of African Americans approaching retirement age now face a perilous future.”

Just how insecure the future has become for many seniors is illustrated by new statistics on elderly debt which has increased substantially over the past decade. Over 60 percent of families headed by someone over 55 had housing debt last year, which takes more and more of their income. The largest increases were for people 75 or older. The result has been that older families “have at risk what is typically their most important asset – their home,” according to the Employees Benefit Research Institute.

“Consequently, older families that take on higher housing debt are likely to have difficulty avoiding a major lifestyle change in living arrangements for the remainder, if they have to rely on their home as an asset,” the Institute concluded, and “are placing themselves in a position where they could be forced to sell their home – something that current and past retirees, in general, have not had to do.”

Various public service efforts are underway to aid people who, faced with this new reality in the housing market, are in danger of losing their homes. Groups like the Urban League and Legal Services have established hotlines to respond to people under threat. Special clinics exist in numerous communities offering assistance in working out arrangements that will hopefully avoid mortgage loan defaults. Such programs will help alleviate the pain for many and ameliorate the effects on families and communities. However, they are limited in scope.

In Baltimore, the Community Assistance Network Inc. reports more and more moderate-income people requesting help with their mortgages, rents and even evictions. Of the 100 new households the agency's shelter housed in May, 85 percent of them had recently been evicted. "I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but we have reached our maximum capacity in the emergency assistance that we do,” the agency’s director Richard P. Doran told the Baltimore Sun.

The larger question remains: will the government acknowledge that current economic circumstances – to a large degree the result of official policies – are threatening the security and well-being of many people? Will the political leadership find a way to reduce or halt the epidemic of foreclosures and evictions?

Part 1 of Fleecing Working People

“Left Margin” is a new BC column and will be published approximately every two weeks.

BC Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.