Pennsylvania isn't Florida, Nevada or California. It hasn't been swamped with home foreclosures. Still, if you're about to lose your home here, it's no comfort knowing you're an exception.

So while Allegheny County is bucking the national trend -- the number of homes going to sheriff's sale actually has dipped slightly in each of the past two years -- the roughly 375 homes that go out for bid in the Gold Room of the Courthouse each month represent the failures.

"I don't want to be remembered as the Sheriff of Nottingham,'' County Sheriff Bill Mullen says.

So at the end of all those pages of sheriff's sale notices that run in this newspaper each month there is Sheriff Mullen's tip sheet:

" ... You still have time to save your property.'' He offers three phone numbers for lawyer referrals, and one for free counseling from ACORN of Allegheny County, 1-877-722-2676.

Sheriff Mullen has been reading the forecasts about adjusted-rate mortgages set to soar out of reach of the homeowners that hold them, and more sheriff's sales are not what he, ACORN or legitimate lenders want.

So, in July, the sheriff asked Allegheny County Common Pleas President Judge Joseph M. James to order lenders to meet with homeowners to try to work out a solution before any sheriff's sale.

Judge James could not be reached for comment yesterday, so I can't say lenders here will ever get that order. But a similar program in Philadelphia seems to be working well three months in.

Ian Phillips, legislative director for the Pennsylvania arm of ACORN, says that after the first two rounds of counseling sessions, "430 out of the 552 homeowners who came into the program are still in their homes.''

Michael McKeever, an attorney who represents lenders in Pennsylvania, likes the program, too. "Anything that can get homeowners out and talking to the lenders is much more important and appropriate than a foreclosure,'' he said.

That doesn't mean miracles. A mortgagor can't just waltz in and say "I'd like to pay less.'' And if you have a $150,000 mortgage and don't make much money, guess what? You ought to be renting.

But if you have a legitimate issue -- an injury, a cut in overtime, a divorce -- the lender could be flexible, Mr. McKeever said. There are ways, for instance, of moving the amount in arrears back into the mortgage as additional principal. Then the monthly payment would rise only slightly. Or maybe the person is given a 12-month payment plan to clear up the mess. "We could do that all day, every day,'' he said.

Sometimes, Mr. Phillips said, if a person's adjustable rate mortgage is about to soar from 7 to 12 percent, the lender might accept 8.

In Allegheny County, Maryellen Hayden of the local ACORN chapter says 70 percent of the foreclosure filings last year were on mortgages made by subprime lenders. They went to people with low credit and income and, while some were legitimate loans, others were "predatory'' with the "loan written in such a way that it's unaffordable and it's going to drive the person into foreclosure.''

Even those of us with conventional mortgages can get writer's cramp just remembering all the papers shoved in front of us on closing day. That some have been burned by such legalese is not entirely a surprise.

But this is a week when the national plan is to throw as much as $700 billion into a kitty because ill-considered mortgage deals became a crisis when they were multiplied by trillions of dollars in "credit-default swap derivatives," an unregulated financial morass that made a lot of people rich and patsies of the rest of us.

As we throw money up toward some of the very people who created that problem, it's good to see some focused on keeping working people in their homes if they have the means to stay there.

"There's fancy talk about protecting taxpayers,'' Ms. Hayden says. "The people losing their homes are taxpayers, and the people whose property values drop because the house next door goes vacant are taxpayers."

Lenders and community activists both say it's best to catch problems early, but Pennsylvania has a Homeowners Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program that dates to 1983. For those who qualify, the state pays the lender enough to make the mortgage current again and the homeowner repays the state and resumes regular mortgage payments.