A milestone for mortgage-foreclosure diversion program

The numbers achieved in Year One of Philadelphia's pilot mortgage-foreclosure diversion program are in. And at an anniversary event yesterday, it was clear Common Pleas Court Administrative Judge D. Webster Keogh was impressed.

"Quite dramatic," Keogh said of results of the program, which has received national recognition and is being imitated in other cities:

Number of participating homeowners: 5,000.

Foreclosures averted: 1,400.

Sheriff's sales postponed for more discussion: 700.

Speaking to a crowded City Hall courtroom yesterday, the program's chief driver, Common Pleas Judge Annette Rizzo, said, "While we've come a long way, we've got a lot more to do."

New figures released yesterday by the federal government underscored Rizzo's observation.

Delinquencies and foreclosures involving prime mortgages - typically held by people with the best credit - increased more than 20 percent in the first quarter over the fourth quarter of 2008 "as economic pressures continued to weigh on homeowners," the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reported.

Rising unemployment, as predicted, has begun to take its toll on housing.

"It's getting worse. We'll probably see the full effects in six months," said Terry Gillen, executive director of the city's Redevelopment Authority, who continues to play a major role in the foreclosure-diversion program.

Nationally, foreclosures are increasing as a result, especially as moratoriums imposed by lenders end and more loans become delinquent.

"All evidence indicates that the foreclosure problem is getting worse," said IHS Global Insight economist Patrick Newport, noting that today's Case-Shiller report for April showed that home-price declines are slowing.

Case-Shiller spokesman David M. Blitzer said the April numbers indicated that "some stabilization may be appearing in some of the regions."

Still, Newport said, "prices will fall further, since foreclosures are still rising."

Data collected by the Comptroller of the Currency's Office show that loan modifications also are increasing - dramatically. They were up 55 percent in the first quarter from the fourth quarter of 2008, and 172 percent over the first quarter of 2008.

These modifications are reducing loan payments, the data show. Comptroller John Dugan complained in a report last fall that few modifications in early 2008 actually lowered borrowers' payments, resulting in more than half of those loans becoming delinquent again.

Yesterday, Dugan said that the "shift in emphasis by servicers to more sustainable, payment-reducing modifications is a positive step that should show significant benefits in coming months."

He said he believes the Obama administration's Making Home Affordable program, which seeks to modify or refinance 9 million mortgages, will help "offset the impact of this very difficult economic cycle."

Unlike Philadelphia's foreclosure-diversion program, which requires mandatory lender participation, Making Home Affordable is voluntary. (A state House bill that would have brought foreclosure diversion to all of Pennsylvania was withdrawn by its sponsor, Philadelphia Democrat Michael McGeehan, when lenders tried to make it voluntary.)

So far, 16 mortgage servicers, representing 80 percent of home loans nationally, have signed on to Making Home Affordable, according to Deputy Treasury Secretary Seth Wheeler.

That isn't enough for the community-action group ACORN, which sponsored protests yesterday in Philadelphia and 13 other cities against what it calls "the Homewrecker 4" - Goldman Sachs' Litton subsidiary, Barclays' HomEq, American Home Mortgage, and OneWest.

The Philadelphia protest, at Goldman Sachs' Market Street office, was small compared to others, said ACORN's legislative director, Ian Phillips. Litton services a large number of mortgages in this region, he said.

Neither national statistics nor local protest affected the City Hall celebration, attended by some of the 250 lawyers who donate their time representing homeowners, as well as those who have been knocking on the doors of homeowners facing foreclosure to get them to participate in the diversion program.

"Even if you saved just one house," State Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald Castille said, "that would have made this program a success."