South Jordan • Adam Schafer is absorbed with worry about losing his South Jordan home as he watches son Tommy push a talking Tonka truck across the living-room floor.

"Hold on, little buddy," the plastic toy chirps as the 2-year-old smiles. "Help is on the way."

But beyond unemployment checks, little help has come during the past year to the Schafers, one of more than 20,000 Utah families confronted by a foreclosure monster that is now snaking deeper into west-side suburbs along the Wasatch Front and smaller towns throughout the state.

Laid off a year ago from his information-technology job installing videophones for the hearing impaired, the 33-year-old father of four has landed just two interviews in applying for hundreds of jobs, a search for work sometimes complicated by his own deafness.

Maddening attempts to modify his home loan with Chase bank failed "after a paperwork hell," Schafer says. With at least $30,000 in medical debts and jobless benefits all but exhausted, he and his wife, Lisa, fret daily about the bank seizing their two-story house in Daybreak and forcing them out.

Beyond the financial devastation, foreclosure would mean being uprooted from a community they love, yanking children out of school and either moving in with relatives or leaving the state.

"We are absolutely on tenterhooks," Adam Schafer says, "waiting to see what happens."

For every house lost to foreclosure since the crisis began several years ago, another three or more could soon land in similar circumstances within the year, suggests a data analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune. A national report by mortgage bankers indicates one in 10 Utahns is either struggling to make house payments or is already losing the property.

Painful impacts swell outward from each of the distressed homes and foreclosure signs that now dot the landscape. The social, political and economic fallout is likely to be felt for years.

"It really is about all of us. We’re all affected,’’ says Layton Mayor Steve Curtis, who, last year, faced a wrongful foreclosure of his own. "It’s your neighbor. It’s your co-worker. It’s someone in your church. It’s your mayor."

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Effect felt far and wide » Utah ranks fourth worst in the nation for foreclosure rates — one of every 322 housing units. Only Nevada, Arizona and California are worse. But a house-by-house mapping analysis by The Tribune of nearly 77,200 records provided by foreclosure-listing company RealtyTrac paints an even more complex and troubling picture.

Staggering in their statewide breadth, foreclosure patterns have intensified along the Wasatch Front’s west side, especially in the housing-boom suburbs of Salt Lake, Davis, Weber and Utah counties. And in an indication of the construction bubble lending practices that precipitated the collapse, foreclosure clusters tend to be denser in housing developments completed just before the downturn.

The early stages of Utah’s foreclosure disaster hit homeowners with ill-conceived and exotic adjustable-rate mortgages as plunging home prices prevented them from refinancing. While that first wave slammed residents at many income levels, a second, recession-driven tide followed, swallowing moderate-income Utahns with blue-collar jobs.

The paper’s analysis indicates middle- and working-class neighborhoods in the state’s four most populous counties are bearing a heavy foreclosure burden. Many of these areas have especially high levels of borrowers who were recently notified that they are at least 90 days behind on their mortgages.

Experts are now seeing a third wave of foreclosures from "strategic defaulters," weary homeowners who simply walk away from their underwater mortgages.