Quick, where’s the foreclosure rate higher – upper-middle class Folsom or low-upper class El Dorado Hills?

It’s higher in suave El Dorado Hills, significantly higher – by 50 percent.

El Dorado Hills has one repossessed, bank-owned property for every 109.5 households, while Folsom has one for every 164.3 households, according to statistics from the Realty Trac Web site and using California’s official average of 2.9 persons per household.

Placerville has one bank-repossessed property per every 82 households.

In Elk Grove and Stockton, recognized as foreclosure-ravaged, it’s notably, but not drastically, worse than in Placer-ville – one per 32 in Elk Grove, one per 35 in Stockton.

In foothill communities along the Highway 50 corridor, Shingle Springs has the sole genuinely comfortable-looking foreclosure statistic – one in 588 households.

Part of the foreclosure dilemma traces to adjustable rate loans, where monthly repayment amounts vary with the prevailing interest rate.

“We’re still going to see foreclosures increase, as long as people can’t get out of adjustable-rate mortgages,” said mortgage lender Barbara Ott of Integrity Lending in Placerville. “Banks are eating hundreds of mortgages.”

The El Dorado Hills foreclosure-to-household ratio is around 50 percent higher than Folsom’s, which is one foreclosure per 164 households. That might reflect the fact that EDH housing prices tend to outstrip income more than they do in Folsom, according to Money Magazine. El Dorado Hills’s median income of $116,406 amounts to 17 percent of the median home price of $672,335. Folsom’s $94,180 median income accounts for 19 percent of the city’s $490,000 median home price.

Local lenders have had to tighten loan criteria, said Greg Barrows of Absolute Loans Inc. of Cameron Park.

“Especially on ‘jumbo’ loans, more than $417,000,” Barrows said.

Cameron Park’s foreclosure-to-household rate is one in 132.

Ott said a once-common practice of loaning to borrowers without proof of their incomes is changing fast in the lending industry.

“A lot of ‘stated-income’ programs are gone,” she said. “Lending limits on stated-income are dropping -- instead of 80 percent of (home) value, it’s now 65 percent.”

Also disappearing is a lending habit of loaning to borrowers who had proven they were bad risks -- “sub-prime” borrowers. On the increase is a borrower’s habit of selling a house for a price that falls short of what the homeowner still owes on the mortgage.

“The sub-prime market is gone,” said Greg Clines of Century Oak Mortgage of Folsom. “There will be more ‘short’ sales and foreclosures in the next one and a half years. They won’t be a majority of houses offered, but they will be a majority of houses actually selling.”

The Telegraph”s Roger Phelps can be reached at rogerp@goldcountrymedia.com, or post a comment at folsomtelegraph.com