New Congressional Oversight Panel Report Focus on HAMP.

Web page for report is HERE; actual report is HERE. Finally, the executive summary is HERE. From the report:

The Panel now estimates that, if current trends hold, HAMP will prevent only 700,000 foreclosures -- far fewer than the three to four million foreclosures that Treasury initially aimed to stop, and vastly fewer than the eight to 13 million foreclosures expected by 2012.

On the Hardest Hit program the report says, 

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last month projected that Treasury will spend only $12 billion on all TARP housing programs, including HAMP and the Hardest Hit Fund, out of the $45.6 billion in TARP funds allocated for those programs. While the CBO did not publish a breakdown of how it expects the projected $12 billion to be divided between the
various TARP housing programs, if one assumes that the Hardest Hit Fund-recipient states will spend the $7.6 billion allocated to them in grants, that would leave only $4.4 billion to be spent on HAMP and the other TARP housing programs. [Editor's comment: HH would thus represent 63% of All TARP funding].

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

Congressional Oversight Panel Issues Report: Examining the Consequences of Mortgage Irregularities for Financial Stability and Foreclosure Mitigation.

Full 127 page report is HERE, their PR is HERE; WaPo news story is HERE.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

Off Topic: Congress?, There's an App for That.

Loving my IPhone, don't know why I waited so long to buy it last year (Wait I remember now why I waited, it COSTS so damn much).

Latest free app I just added is from folks at Sunlight Foundation.

App is called Real Time Congress; news story is HERE.
Sunlight Foundation description is HERE; app features include:

• Live Floor Updates - Updates from the House and Senate floor as they happen.

• Key Documents - See critical reports and memos as they are published online by the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, Office of Management and Budget, party policy committees and more!

• Whip Notices - Daily and weekly notices from the House Majority and Minority Whips.
• Hearing Schedules - Schedule of upcoming committee hearings from House and Senate.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

Congressional Directory.

More than you ever wanted to know is in government publication HERE.

Oregon delegation profiles in PDF are HERE.

Also includes contact, names, and bios for Cabinet agency officials; HUD section (may be a little out of date as former Commissioner is shown) is HERE.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

Congressional Update: Senate Passes Fraud Bill, House Fin. Services Marking Up New Truth in Lending Provisions.

AP news story is HERE.

Senate bill is S. 386, HERE

House Bill is H.R. 1728. Bill is being marked up today by Housing Financial Services Committee today; text is HERE.

H.R. 1 Final Bill.

The 407 page final version of H.R.1 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (prior to President's signature) IS HERE.

Full Recovery Bill Conference Report from Congressional Record.

The recovery bill Conference Committee Report (111-16) from the Congressional Record HERE is the first in which text can be searched (it's 200+pages); it does not include the bill text itself, which is yet to be available on Thomas.

(CBO Cost Estimate for final bill is HERE).

HUD National Dollars in Conference Recovery Bill Total $13.61 Billion; I Project $105.6 Million for Oregon.

I have prepared HERE a summary table of my analysis of HUD [appropriation] dollars in the Conference report/final recovery bill that will be voted on in next day or so. Note that this does NOT include any housing related tax projections.

Table also includes my projection that Oregon is likely to receive $105.6 million in HUD funding, that's down a little less than $6 million from my prior projection. .

As of Thursday night, conference bill materials are posted in multiple files at the House Rules committee website HERE.

Grunt Work on HR 3221 Over the Last Year.

Interesting listing HERE on C-SPAN site of all of the congressional action that has taken place on HR 3221 in the last year.

I count 37 days so far in the last year when Congress has considered this ONE piece of legislation.

Note also that this does NOT include:

1. Action taken on other housing reform bills some of which were eventually merged into HR 3221).
2. A count of the multiple actions that occurred on HR 3221 in the same day.

NY Times Profile of Barney Frank.

Profile of my favorite, and the funniest and one of the smartest members of Congress, House Financial Services Chair Barney Frank is HERE. Excerpt:

"When Representative Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, criticized a component of the housing bill that would give money to local governments to buy and repair foreclosed properties, saying it would not protect homeowners from foreclosure, Mr. Frank fired back that preventing foreclosures was the goal of a different bill."

“The notion that this bill doesn’t keep people out of foreclosure is true,” he said. “It doesn’t combat global warming. It doesn’t get troops out of Iraq. It won’t help me lose weight. There are a lot of things this bill won’t do that I very much want to do. None of them are a reason to vote against a bill that doesn’t do what it doesn’t say it’s going to do but does what it does. What it does is go to the aid of cities that have been victimized.”

New Congressional Foreclosure Prevention Proposal Would Feature New $300 Billion FHA Refinance Program.

House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank and Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd announced today their joint proposal to help reduce future foreclosures. Prominent is new $300 BILLION program to allow refinance into FHA loan product, with provisions for government to share (upon resale of later refinance) in any subsequent equity build up.

Bloomberg story HERE; Frank summary of the proposal HERE.

CNNMoney Predicts April FHA Reform Bill Passage.

Their story is HERE.

Cross Post: Real Estate Industry Spent $65M+ on 2007 U.S. Senate Lobbying.

A cross post from from my Oregon Open Government blog HERE.

Iraq War Cost Impacts on Housing and Other Programs: VA Disability Payments.

Every dollar spent in Iraq is a dollar less available for other purposes, including but not limited to, housing.

I have begun reading a new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War. (Fresh Air NPR story on the book HERE). It's written by a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and is packed with facts, figures, and footnotes that support his three trillion dollar cost conclusion.

As I work my way through the book my plan is to highlight data to illustrate the scale of the true financial costs of the war (the political and personal costs are already well documented).

Maybe because I am a Vietnam vet one of the first items to get my attention was the number of veterans receiving veterans disability payments, and the cost of those payments, as covered in Chapter 3 of the book.

Some key data:

• 3.5 million veterans now receive disability benefits, annual cost $34.5 billion, average benefit $8,890.
• More than 900,000 recipients from Vietnam war
• More than 210,000 recipients from first Gulf war (About 40% of first Gulf war veterans by my calculation), $4.3 Billion annually
• Pending claim backlog December 2007: 400,000+
  

Iraq- Afghanistan Wars

• 1.6 million troops have been deployed so far to Iraq and Afghanistan
• 31% (224,000) of 751,000 discharged have filed claims through Dec.07, (Claims approval rate as of summer '07 was 90%), $1.3 billion annually.
  
• 2012 Projection: 405,000 claims filed, $3.1 billion annually
• 2017 Projection: 712,000 claims filed, $6.2 billion annually

HUD FY 2009 Congressional Budget Justification Site Has Buried Nuggets.

Each year, after the budget is presented in early February, HUD posts DETAILED justifications for various programs and organizational divisions.

HUD has now posted the budget justifications for the FY 2009 budget HERE.

This detailed budget information can yield interesting insights. Buried on page 130 of the 150 page PDF Housing section HERE, the budget estimate is that HUD will assist 43,000+ FEWER project based units in FY 2009 vs. the actual project based assistance provided in FY 2007. (1,243,233 vs.1,286,662). Similarly Public Housing units are also projected to decline by 25,000 units (1,155,377 vs. 1,130,343) for a combined two year net loss of 68,000 units in these two programs.

Coupled with reductions in families served by tenant based Section 8 vouchers (HUD does not break out unit counts for vouchers), HUD clearly is helping FEWER absolute numbers of households that it has done at any time in the recent past and is coming nowhere near close to keeping up with even simple population growth.

New CRS Report: Constitutional Issues with Proposed Mortgage Rate Freezes/Reductions.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) report reviews constitutional issues with various rate freezes/rate reductions proposed to deal with current sub prime loan problems. Report is available HERE.

Cross Post: CRS Report on Earmark Executive Order.

Cross Post From Oregon Earmarks Blog , HERE

From the report:
" Courts have acknowledged a premise upon which the order appears to be based: Earmarks in legislative history documents and other sources that are not anchored in statutory text have no legal force or effect"

HOPE VI Bill Up for Consideration in House This Week: CBO Puts Cost at $900 Million.

H.R. 3524 , which would reauthorize the HOPE VI public housing revitalization program, is scheduled for consideration this week in the House.

The House Report ,110-507, on this bill, is HERE.

Thomas information on this bill is HERE.

Congressional Budget Office cost estimates 5 years costs of $900 Million. Their analysis can be found HERE.

Extension of Mortgage Insurance Deduction: Unpublished Letter to Oregonian Editor.

[Link Correction]
I sent this letter on Thursday December 27th to the Letters to the Editor at the Oregonian. I expect it will not be published.

To the Editor:

Today's editorial Gordon Smith on the Home Front (HERE) lauded Senator Smith for passage of an extension of the tax deductibility of mortgage insurance premiums. The editorial projected that 90% of the Oregonians would be income eligible for the deduction. There are two problems I see with your endorsement of this costly revenue reducing tax provision.

1. The deduction is NOT targeted. Whether good or bad, the SCHIP child health insurance debate helped to focus attention on income targeting. This deduction is NOT targeted and would allow homeowners with income in excess of $100,000 to claim the deduction (phase out begins only at $100,000 of adjusted gross income for married couples). Up to the phase out levels, the higher the income and the higher the cost of mortgage insurance/more expensive the home, the higher is the potential cost to the government in lost revenue. (The 90% of Oregonians cited as income eligible in the editorial is meaningless—renters can't claim the deduction, and only those owners who pay mortgage insurance AND who itemize the deduction will be able to take the deduction on their federal tax return). See this Tax Foundation Fact sheet (http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/ff49.pdf) for more information on who benefits from the home mortgage interest deduction.

2. The Cost for this Additional Home ownership Subsidy Is Not the Highest Housing Priority. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the cost of the mortgage insurance provision will be $570 million dollars over the next 10 years. (See CBO cost estimates for H.R. 3648 found at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/86xx/doc8667/hr3648.pdf). With the current federal revenue loss from property taxes, mortgage insurance, and gain on sale estimated at more than $120 BILLION a year [see footnote at the bottom page 17 of the Congressional Research Service analysis of H.R. 3648 found at http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34212_20071206.pdf) and with other housing programs facing budget cutbacks, adding yet another additional subsidy without significant income targeting for home ownership cannot be the highest housing priority facing our country.

CROSS POST: News Flash for President, Earmark DOLLARS have Declined by 25%-36%.

From Oregon Earmarks Blog HERE.