With high unemployment showing little sign of abating, foreclosures are now spreading throughout the country and hitting areas that didn’t benefit from a scorching hot real estate market in the earlier part of the decade. The new story of foreclosures is even more frightening.

It’s not speculators and investors losing the multiple properties they were hoping to flip, or people with exotic mortgages who shouldn’t have bought the pricey homes they did having to move. Now the jobless around the country are being forced from their modest homes after exhausting every option to make on more payment.

While homes are still being padlocked at a high rate in traditional foreclosure hot spots like Las Vegas and Orange County, unlikely candidates like Burlington, Vermont and Lincoln, Nebraska are on the list of areas with the fastest growing foreclosure rates.

In addition to employment woes, adjustable rate mortgages are also contributing to the trend hitting places like Boise and Salt Lake City, according to RealtyTrac.  In a recent press release their CEO, James J. Saccacio, is quoted as saying “Rising unemployment and a new variety of mortgage resets continued to gradually shift the nation’s foreclosure epicenters in the third quarter away from the hot spots of the last two years and toward some metro areas that had avoided the brunt of the first foreclosure wave.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association predicts that unemployment and foreclosures won’t peak until next year. So things will continue to get worse before they get better.