A year ago, losing a house to bank repossession still seemed like a rare event, confined to people enduring unfortunate personal circumstances - job loss, divorce, illness, death of a wage earner.

But this year, as the real estate market slumped, housing prices sagged and - most important - massive numbers of adjustable-rate mortgages reset to exorbitant rates, foreclosures became commonplace, their numbers soaring every quarter. California, a favorite hunting ground for the so-called “exploding ARMS,” has been particularly hard-hit.

In July, The Chronicle profiled four Bay Area families who faced the prospect of losing their homes to foreclosure. The purpose was to show the personal decisions and market changes that bring about foreclosures, as well as to illuminate the underlying mortgages and the process itself.

This month, we revisited those families to see what had happened. Ultimately, all their stories illustrate how macroeconomic forces play out on a small scale in people’s lives. The outcomes also show the sometimes-capricious twists foreclosures can take, and that good intentions and hard work aren’t always enough.

A Vallejo man who thought his on-time payments would qualify him for a refinance saw that hope evaporate. Despite having worked almost every weekend for two years to pay his mortgage, he ended up losing his house. An Oakland man who had fallen behind on his mortgage and property taxes racked up overtime shifts to get caught up, and then persuaded the lender to permanently modify his mortgage to a lower rate, allowing him to keep the house.

Two families who never made payments after refinancing had opposite results. A Fairfield couple who walked away from their house lost it to foreclosure nine months after the refinance. But an Oakland family that has not made a payment for an entire year remains in their house - albeit in limbo.

The Bay Area is in better shape than places like Sacramento or Stockton, but even here the impact has been significant. From January through November, according to DataQuick Information Systems, lenders repossessed almost 10,000 Bay Area homes and sent more than 33,000 notices of default, indicating the first stage in the foreclosure process.

Ripples from foreclosures are spreading: Home prices have plummeted in hard-hit communities; Wall Street firms have taken multibillion-dollar losses; jobs in construction, mortgage finance and real estate have been eliminated; cities and states foresee huge tax shortfalls for next year; consumers have reined in spending; borrowing money has become harder for everyone from home buyers to corporations.

Now many experts say the foreclosure crisis has led the nation to the brink of recession.

And the pain has just begun, because far more mortgages are slated to reset in 2008. Experts now predict as many as 2 million more foreclosures nationwide over the next 18 months.

In recent months, the subprime loan crisis has been thrust into public consciousness with a vengeance, but how to solve it and who is to blame remain sources of raging debate. Many people fiercely oppose anything that smacks of a bailout for borrowers or lenders whom they view as irresponsible, greedy and, in some cases, even criminal.

The White House, Congress and bank regulators have set some potential solutions in motion, such as temporarily freezing initial interest rates for some mortgages, and more ideas continue to be bandied about. Measures to clamp down on abusive lending in the future are pending, but they won’t help the people already caught up in the maelstrom.

Belief that fraud ran rampant in the mortgage lending system is strong, but few have been held accountable to date. That can be seen on a small scale in the four Bay Area stories: While all four homeowners say that fraud or misrepresentation occurred when they got their mortgages, there is no clear-cut way to prove it.

– For previous stories on the U.S. foreclosure debacle, go to sfgate.com and type “Mortgage Meltdown” in the search box.