Port St. Lucie and Palm Beach County are among the areas getting federal help in cleaning up the foreclosure mess. Even better would be more help in preventing foreclosures.

Foreclosures have hit Port St. Lucie particularly hard, with estimates of up to 11 percent of homes in some stage of foreclosure. On a sample day this month, 622 homes were in foreclosure and another 1,680 were in the process of foreclosure. A federal grant of $13.5 million will help. Port St. Lucie will use the money from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program - part of a larger housing bill Congress passed this summer - to buy, rehab and resell foreclosed homes at affordable prices.

The rehab projects will provide jobs in the hard-hit construction industry. Keeping homes from blighting neighborhoods and getting new homeowners into them will help protect home values. The program is targeted at lower-income people - those who make up to 120 percent of the median income - and can be used to help buyers make down payments.

In all, Florida will get $541 million from the program. Palm Beach County, where an estimated 12,000 homes are in foreclosure, is set to receive $27 million, with another $4.3 million going to West Palm Beach and $2.9 million to Boynton Beach. Of course, that won't be enough to clear out all the foreclosures. In keeping with much of what the government has done during this economic crisis, the money won't actually start flowing for several months.

During that wait, even more homeowners will fall into foreclosure. Federal, state and even local programs exist to prevent some foreclosures. Some private lenders also have programs. But it all amounts to a piecemeal program.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson still doesn't want to use part of the $700 billion financial bailout to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, even though the original measure said the money could be used for that purpose. Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., has pushed in vain for a program that she says could prevent 1.5 million foreclosures through 2009. Without it, she warned this week, the United States could have 4 million to 5 million foreclosures in the next two years.

Mortgage defaults triggered the financial crisis. If Washington doesn't start acting to help slow those defaults, the crisis will worsen.