A full month ago the Hope for Homeowners plan was declared “hopeless“, pointing out that the program designed to help 400,000 homeowners by now had closed a whopping 25 loans. That’s not even a hundreth of a percent of their goal. There were a lot of reasons it didn’t work, including high fees for homeowners and heavy losses for banks. 

Today, CNN reports that the program has only actually prevented one forclosure. In fact, they’ve only received 752 applications! The amazing part of that is that they receive thousands of calls each day. Nevertheless, Congress thinks the program can be “tweaked”. I doubt anything can save the program short of forcing bank participation, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea either. 

In other news, there are some signs that the market for pre-existing housing is stablizing, but there remains what some experts call a “distressing” gap between pre-existing home sales and new home sales.

This gap, in my opinion, is caused by the fact that some bank-owned and short-sale homes are being sold for prices the builders simply can’t compete with. If you have $150,000 to spend on housing, which would you prefer: a slightly older but bigger home on a bigger lot that needs some work; or something with “new house smell”? 

I’d like to close with a local interest item. Las Vegas is in the desert. Our water company reminds us of this regularly in radio and print ads. This last Sunday, the local paper published a list of the 100 biggest residential water users, noting that their use could have covered 1950 “normal” users. By way of counterpoint, here’s 5 cheap ways to save 1000 gallons of water every year in your home. If you pay for your own water, you can’t afford not to read it.