Posts Tagged: HAMP
More mortgage modification woes
Here is an indirect sign of how the federal government has failed homeowners in danger of entering foreclosure. (more…)
Criminalizing HAMP
Trial and permanent home mortgage loan modifications run by TARP continue to drop in the Chicago region, writes Dory Rand, president of the Woodstock Institute, a Chicago research and advocacy group. The number of active mortgage loan modifications under TARP’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, is down 1.4 percent, to 32,880 in the Chicago area. The major problem with this minor decrease is found in a separate Woodstock report: foreclosure filings are up 25 percent in the Chicago region from the first three quarters to 2009 to first three quarters of 2010. (more…)
Chicago’s foreclosure crisis
The Chicago Reporter’s Megan Cottrell sorts through Center for Housing Policy data to compare Chicago’s foreclosure rate with other cities. The results will not be a point of civic pride: Chicago ranks 51st among the 366 largest U.S. metro areas in numbers of foreclosures, ahead of other mega-cities like New York or Los Angeles.
How do Obama administration policies play into the city’s high foreclosure rate? (more…)
Illinois foundering in foreclosures
As foreclosures rise in Illinois, fewer homeowners in the Chicago region are getting federal government-provided modifications on their mortgage. The Woodstock Institute, a Chicago economic research and advocacy group, last week crunched numbers that show Chicago area Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) modifications have declined since statistics became available November 2009. The dip is a slight one — 34,000 trial modifications in July compared to a high of 51,000 in March and 36,000 last November. But it comes as foreclosures in Illinois have increased 35 percent between July 2009 and July 2010. Illinois saw 19,600 new home foreclosures in July alone.
Illinois is not indicative of a national trend — foreclosures have dropped 10 percent nationally. But the data points to problems that the Obama administration has had in responding to foreclosures. (more…)
PSA: Inside the Agency, Outside the Box at FDIC
Another in Understanding Government’s series “Public Service Announcement” profiling the careers and challenges of notable government employees
By Norman Kelley
At the epicenter of last year’s economic meltdown, along with the disappearance of major financial firms, was the collapse of IndyMac Federal Bank, a California-based institution that found itself overwhelmed with distressed mortgages. A result of the nation’s toxic housing bubble (and an at-sleep-at-the-wheel regulatory infrastructure), IndyMac was emblematic of the country’s national mortgage foreclosure crisis. FDIC economist Clare Rowley was in the eye of Indy Mac’s particular hurricane, trying to rectify that bank’s troubled assets and find ways to save homeowners with IndyMac mortgages from foreclosure.
In July 2008, along with other FDIC colleagues, Rowley was dispatched to Pasadena, California, site of IndyMac’s home office. There she helped implement a mortgage modification program that allowed qualified but struggling mortgage holders to stay in their homes. The FDIC’s modification program, which some called a “Model in a Box,” consisted of three basic parts: lowering interest rates, extending loan terms, and principal forbearance. The model worked: by the spring of 2009, 88 % of modified loans were still in force.
When the new Obama administration began tackling the mortgage crisis in mid-2009, (more…)