From Newsday - Job Loss and Foreclosure

Job loss now reflected in foreclosure numbers

August 18, 2009 by TOM INCANTALUPO / tom.incantalupo@newsday.com

One lawyer calls it "Chapter 2" of the housing crisis: Increasingly, home foreclosures are the result of job loss, not subprime borrowers' getting slammed by resetting variable-rate mortgages or payments they'd have had trouble making even in a healthy economy.

And, experts said, solutions such as refinancing, stretching out loan terms and reducing interest rates are tougher to find when the household has either a greatly reduced income or none at all except for unemployment benefits. Making matters worse, falling home prices have made refinancing nearly impossible for many homeowners - employed or not - whose mortgages now exceed their home's value.

"It's a lot more difficult to work with a client who has no income," said Peter Elkowitz Jr., president of the Long Island Housing Partnership, a Hauppauge-based organization that offers counseling for homeowners in financial distress.

The trend nationally was documented in May in a report by the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group based in Washington, which said that in the first three months of 2009 the foreclosure rate on prime, fixed-rate loans had doubled from a year earlier and, for the first time since the rapid growth of subprime lending, represented the largest share of new foreclosures.

"More than anything else, this points to the impact of the recession and drops in employment on mortgage defaults," Jay Brinkmann, the group's chief economist, said in a statement.

Nassau and Suffolk had the state's second and third highest numbers of newly filed foreclosure cases last month, 736 and 725, respectively, according to RealtyTrac, an online market for foreclosed properties. The Island's unemployment rate was 7.5 percent in June, the highest since 1992. The national rate was 9.4 percent in July.

"Now we are definitely seeing more people either unemployed or where there's been some kind of change in their employment," said Martha Krisel, a Nassau County attorney who also chairs the Nassau County Bar Association Mortgage Foreclosure Task Force. "Often, it's not a huge difference in income, but it's enough that the mortgage payment is impossible."

The housing partnership said it has added two more foreclosure counselors and what executive director Diana Weir calls a "triage person" to get the help process in motion, sending a packet to homeowners with instructions on how to gather needed documents.

Nassau and the bar association hold monthly clinics where attorneys offer free advice on foreclosure and personal bankruptcies. The next session is Sept. 14 at the association's Mineola offices. Reservations are required by calling 516-747-4070.

Noting the growing link between joblessness and foreclosure, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has called for using some of the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program revenue to fund a program to lend money to help jobless homeowners avoid foreclosure.