KnowledgePlex Affordable Housing News

The Mon Valley Initiative is working to help bring aspiring homeowners in southwest Pennsylvania closer to their dreams. Through individual counseling and quarterly workshops, Mike Mauer, a housing counselor with the initiative, shows families how to improve their credit to qualify them for mortgages so they can become homeowners.

Housing starts and permits, both of them key measurements of home construction, hit record lows in October, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. Housing starts reached an annual rate of 791,000 last month, the lowest level since the department began tracking starts in 1959. The rate tumbled 4.5% from the revised reading of 828,000 in September.

Great news: Home prices have fallen! At least that's great news for people buying homes. New statistics show home affordability has soared in the Northern San Joaquin Valley as plummeting prices enable more families to attain the American dream. Stanislaus, Merced and San Joaquin counties now have some of the most affordable homes in California, even considering the region's relatively low income levels.

U.S. stocks fall after the biggest-ever drop in consumer prices and another gloomy housing report offers little cheer to investors already fretting about the fate of the Big Three automakers.

The fight over how to use the Treasury's $700 billion bank rescue fund went into another round on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, with top administration officials testifying that about $60 billion of uncommitted funds should be reserved for potential financial disasters - including another possible big bank failure - rather than bailing out homeowners or the auto industry. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Tuesday that the severe crunch in credit markets has eased somewhat since last month, but markets remain "far from normal," and getting loans is still a problem for banks ...

Should you keep paying your mortgage? If you have significant equity in your home, absolutely. If you don't, it's getting harder to answer that question, especially when our government keeps giving people who owe more than their homes are worth so many reasons not to pay. Last week, the government announced a program that will substantially lower payments for many homeowners who have little or no equity, but only if they are at least 90 days delinquent.

Craig Thomas' voice cracked as she described the problems. Homeless families sleeping in their cars. Elderly residents facing the onset of cold weather without electricity. Unemployed people who can't pay their bills. "Since March, with the downturn in the economy, the needs have become desperate," said Thomas, executive director of Mary's House, one of the nonprofits in Greensboro that provides emergency assistance to the needy. "It is almost like the floodgates have opened. We have always had requests, but it has never been like this." It's the same story ...

We are going through a financial crisis more severe and unpredictable than any in our lifetimes. We have seen the failures, or the equivalent of failures, of Bear Stearns, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the American International Group. Each of these failures would be tremendously consequential in its own right. But we faced them in succession, as our financial system seized up and severely damaged the economy. By September, the government faced a systemwide crisis. After months of making the most of the authority we already had, we asked ...

So who gets a slice of that $700-billion federal taxpayer bailout of the financial services industry? On Monday, news spread that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would leave half the money in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for the incoming Obama administration to dole out. Most of the other $350-billion is already spoken for.

President-elect Barack Obama has been holding his economic cards close to his vest. He did not participate in person at last weekend's meeting of G20 leaders. He has been reluctant to encourage the lame-duck Congress to adopt a major fiscal stimulus package. He may be right in saying that the U.S. has only one president at a time. But this makes it all the more important that he hit the ground running on January 20.

President George W. Bush warned foreign leaders Thursday not to tinker with the free-market system. In a speech given a day before a weekend economic summit where world leaders would discuss the growing financial crisis, Bush said: "But the crisis was not a failure of the free-market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." Big Three automakers are in jeopardy of failing, financial institutions need to be bailed out, mortgage foreclosures increase, professional forecasters say the economy fell into recession in the spring and the ranks of unemployed increase ...

The Orlando City Council on Monday voted to give $100,000 to the Central Florida Regional Commission on Homelessness, far less than hoped for when the organization was rolled out with much fanfare earlier this year.

A controversial housing project in Canton has been put on hold for the time being. Smokey Meadows, a 60-unit apartment complex presented to the Canton Board of Aldermen back in May, is on hold until at least March, said Patsy Dowling, executive director of Mountain Projects. The project will be owned by a limited liability company, which secures the tax credits to help pay for construction, and is assisted by Mountain Projects to obtain grant funding from the state and federal governments to match the money from the tax credits.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the Democratic Party seem to be in a race to see who can flaunt more money at more suppliants in quicker time with less thought. When the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department decided to put $30 billion into Bear Stearns in March, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said they were "pleased" with their efforts to "promote liquid, well-functioning financial markets." There were no warnings from the two financial chiefs that more trouble was ahead. In July, Congress started asking questions about ...

The construction industry is calling on the government to act as it is hammered by the worst downturn since the 1920s, writes Jenny Davey I refer to them as the living dead -they can be kept alive but really they are just ghost companies. That is the shocking description of the state of many of Britain's housebuilders by Alastair Stewart, housebuilding analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort. Job losses are soaring, firms are going bust every day, house and land values are plunging and new-home construction has collapsed to levels not seen since the 1920s. Government ministers are starting ...

Once touted as a potential breakthrough to help solve the foreclosure crisis, the government's Hope for Homeowners program has failed to live up to its billing so far. And there are serious doubts it ever will. Bankers don't like it. Consumers don't understand it. Government regulators don't trust it to solve the problem. The result: Federal housing officials have received fewer than 115 applications since the program took effect Oct. 1. Compare that to the more than 3 million homeowners currently in some form of foreclosure, according to the real-estate research firm RealtyTrac ...

Few observers have ever seen anything like the economic data that will be released in the coming week, with the consumer price index and housing starts each expected to breach records dating back to the late 1940s. With the global economy descending into a nasty recession, the October data could send a chill down the spine of policymakers, who are pulling out all the tricks in their tool kit to prevent a wider meltdown.

Want to help fix the economy and the housing market? Must we continue with all these silly proposals to help the financial businesses that got us into this mess? Or automakers? Why not give the help directly to the masses and see if the results bubble up from the bottom to the overall economy! This is my simple plan: Double the deductibility of mortgage payments.

As weather in the valley cools, local shelters are providing extra beds to give more homeless men, women and children a warm place to sleep at night.

Stocks tumbled Friday morning as the worst retail sales on record gave investors a reason to bail after the previous session's massive rally. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 360 points, or 3.7%, nearly 3 hours into the session. The Standard & Poor's 500 index lost 4.3% and the Nasdaq composite lost 4.6%. "The recession has been mild up to this point, but I think we're in for a much uglier one in the fourth quarter," said Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo. "The retail sales report demonstrates that."