One program after another has been announced in recent months to help homeowners who are facing foreclosure.
The array of initiatives has proven to be confusing for many municipal officials and homeowner counselors. Now, one nonprofit housing group is hoping to make it easier for them to navigate those programs.
The Boston-based Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association has prepared a foreclosure briefing paper that includes information on all the state and federal initiatives designed to help troubled borrowers. CHAPA also wants to establish a Web-based clearinghouse that will be regularly updated.
“There’s been a lot of scattered information and we wanted to pull all the different initiatives in one document, so that people would be aware of what’s going on,” said CHAPA Executive Director Aaron Gornstein.
The 35-page paper features three sections. The first provides an overview of the foreclosure problem, including statewide statistics and projections for 2008. The second highlights Massachusetts’ initiatives like the MassHousing Home Saver Foreclosure Prevention Program, a $250 million plan to help subprime borrowers refinance into fixed-rate loans.
The third section focuses on federal legislation. A list of agency and consumer-assistance Web sites is included at the end of the report.
“I think we do need a central location where information can be disseminated,” said Beth Thompson, who oversees the foreclosure prevention program at South Shore Housing Development in Kingston. Thompson’s agency has counseled 61 borrowers since last October and is planning to hire a second counselor.
“There is a demand [for counseling services],” she said.
The paper comes as foreclosure activity in Massachusetts has surged. Lenders initiated 29,607 foreclosures in 2007, 55 percent more than 2006 when 19,112 foreclosure petitions were filed, according to statistics from The Warren Group, parent company of Banker & Tradesman.
Some estimate that as many as 37,000 borrowers will face foreclosure in Massachusetts this year, according to the CHAPA paper. Over 15,000 subprime adjustable-rate mortgages on owner-occupied homes are expected to reset between December 2007 and November 2008.
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., recently announced another legislative proposal that would provide $300 billion so the Federal Housing Administration can insure and guarantee refinanced mortgages that have been written down by banks and mortgage companies.
“There are so many [proposals] coming down all the time,” said Pamela Parker, a foreclosure prevention counselor at Hyannis-based Housing Assistance Corp.
The CHAPA paper can be found online at www.chapa.org/pdf/StateandFederalForeclosureInitiatives08.pdf.
