The Mortgage Bankers Association just released numbers which shows that the housing and foreclosure crisis is far from over.

• 15% of homeowners in America are either in foreclosure or at least one payment behind.
• 9.67% of mortgage owners who are delinquent by 90 days or more (gone up from 6.3%)
• 4.58% of mortgage loans are in foreclosure (shot up from 3%)
• 1 out of 7 homeowners are struggling with payments

These numbers should be worrying not only because they had gone up from last year but also because this is the result of Obama’s attempt to stem the mortgage crisis with his $50 billion program which was to encourage banks to renegotiate mortgages. The program last year was to help 40 million homeowners to keep their homes but until now only 116,000 homeowners had the chance to receive permanent home loan modifications. There are many reasons for this failure, one of which was that many of the homeowners applying for a loan modification just didn’t qualify.

This year, Obama announced another program which is intended to help homeowners once again, this time in the top five states that the housing crisis hit the most. $1.5 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program is designated by Obama to help struggling homeowners in California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan. The $1.5 billion help is to be divided between those five states based on the number of unemployed residence. This will give the bigger states such as California the biggest share and the smallest share to Nevada at $100 million.

Under the first program last year, banks and lenders were encouraged to modify loans of struggling homeowners to lower payments so they could afford to stay in their homes. That program was supposed to help 40 million homeowners. Unlike the last program, the new program allows each state to develop their own innovative plans and then submit them for funding to help unemployed homeowners and other struggling borrowers to avoid going into foreclosure. It would be very interesting to watch how many homeowners will be helped this time, as the last time not even 1% of the target (40 million homeowners) were actually helped.

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