Posted on 10/08/2007 5:59:31 AM PDT by reaganaut1
For the first time since the Carter administration, homeownership in the United States is set to decline over a president’s tenure. When President Bush took office in 2001, homeownership stood at 67.6 percent. It rose as the mortgage bubble inflated but is projected to fall to 67 percent by early 2009, which would come to 700,000 fewer homeowners than when Mr. Bush started. The decline, calculated by Moody’s Economy.com, is inexorable unless the government launches a heroic effort to help hundreds of thousands of defaulting borrowers stay in their homes.
...
Federal regulators and Treasury officials are urging mortgage lenders and mortgage servicers to do their utmost to modify loan terms for at-risk borrowers, but saying “please” hasn’t worked. To be effective, modifications must reduce a loan’s interest rate or balance or extend its term, or some combination of the three.
...
Congress should move forward on other remedies. The most important is to mend an egregious flaw in the current bankruptcy law that prohibits the courts from modifying repayment terms of most mortgages on a primary home. Two bills, one in the House and one in the Senate, would treat a mortgage like other secured debt, allowing a bankruptcy court to restructure it so that it’s affordable for the borrower. That would give defaulting homeowners and their advocates much needed leverage in dealing with lenders and servicers. Creditors would presumably prefer to cut a deal with a borrower rather than be subject to the decision of a bankruptcy judge.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How about we stop subsidizing this giant scam called “homeownership at any cost”?
More importantly, any loss to the mortgage companies that these new policies would create would get passed on to the people who actually pay their mortgage.
When is Congress going to figure out that businesses pass their costs on to consumers?
No bias there...how about the democrats is shoving taxpayer money at greedy home buyers and flippers, who should have never been able to purchase these homes in the first place, in an effort to but their votes...
The nanny state gripes that banks and mortgage companies don’t allow people with low incomes to buy houses and Congress passes laws against “red lining.” The lenders then must give money to people who are not qualified by their income to pay it back. They can’t pay their mortgage payments, of course, and then Congress wants to have the lenders change the contracts the borrowers signed. No doubt the lenders will insist that the government reimburse them for the difference and the Dems will think that is the compassionate thing to do...with our tax money, of course.
We deserve such treatment because we wear a tattered “KICK ME” sign into the voting booth as we persist in re-electing these grifters.
At-risk borrowers need to modify their behavior to the point at which they are no longer “at risk”!
You can’t always “have it all”; sometimes you have to set and keep priorities and defer some desires.
The government should keep it’s nose out of this. If they want to help, then stop the skyrocketing property taxes. I’ll soon be out on the streets if mine go up any more. If? Ha, they’ve gone from what amounted to 2 weeks pay 12 years ago to now 2 months pay. Yes, it’s the same house and the same job.
NYT desperately trying to stay relevant, and appease Wall Street by backing the mortgage banker bailout.
The numbers are cooked and crooked. Even if they are correct, what’s the statistical difference between 67.6 percent and 67 percent, or for that matter, 700,000 “people”. My estimation is that something on the order of 300,000 people lost their homes during Katrina/Rita. How many have repurchased? How many people are simply “in transit”?
Why not just have the government give everyone in the country a mansion on the beach for free and be done with it?
Read it carefully and you see that homeownership has gone up. They project it to go down some time in the future, but for now it is up. It will probably still be up when Bush leaves office, which is why they are qualifying their remarks to set the time frame out into 2009 some time. They won't have to be right or wrong until Bush has been out of office for some time.
It is not “mr. Bush,” you freaking troglodyte.
Its “President Bush.”
How many “immigrants” since then?
How much has the official population increased, hm?
Not true. Lenders may deny loans to anyone so long as everyone has to meet the same standards. It is when they make exceptions to the standards that they get burned.
Yep.
and a Ferrari.
And give everyone in the 3rd world a puppy, and all will be well with the world.
Since Bush took office, the population of the US has increased by about 22 million and will be around 25 million by the time he leaves office. Demographics have something to do with the percentage staying roughly the same given the fact that immigration, legal and illegal, account for 3/4 of the population increase.
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Wow, a New York Slimes article that distorts the truth to blame Bush. Who would have guessed it?
The only reason home ownership is dropping is the MASSIVE influx of illegal aliens and low wage earners from Mexico.
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