A stimulus shot in the arm for Pike’s Peak veterans

With its stimulus spending, the Obama administration is looking to do two main things: put people to work immediately and create jobs for the future. The best stimulus projects do both.

A proposal being floated in Colorado Springs by a nonprofit counseling group called Pike’s Peak Behavioral Health puts its increasing population of military veteran clients and patients to work now with plans for work in the future, and has the added benefit of making something useful of foreclosed apartment projects around the state.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac quietly lift moratorium on foreclosures

A ban on foreclosure sales and evictions from houses owned by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which began as a high-profile effort just before the holidays to keep people in their homes as the government tried to come up with homeowner rescue plans, is over.

Spokesmen for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac confirmed the ban ended March 31, in a response to an inquiry from our sister site, The Washington Independent. But its expiration didn’t seem to merit the same level of fanfare, with some housing advocates caught by surprise, scrambling for information today and Wednesday on listservs and in phone calls.

Unabashed financial sector still the problem

For more on what went wrong with the economy and why it will be so difficult to fix, there’s good material of every length on the web these days — and most of it lands on one answer.

Land banks could relieve pressure of mounting foreclosures

Abandoned and vacant foreclosed homes rapidly piling up in neighborhoods like these around the country are serving as symbols of the secondary damage caused by the foreclosure crisis — a catastrophe felt on the ground but still unseen by Washington. While Treasury Department officials and lawmakers look the other way, communities with shrinking resources are mostly on their own to deal with the blight and drag on property values caused by staggeringly high numbers of empty homes left behind.

ACORN prepares civil disobedience strategy in case of Aurora foreclosure

Community organizers are recruiting volunteers to pressure lenders and law enforcement officials not to foreclose on homes in Colorado — and, if the pressure doesn’t work, volunteers plan to lock arms and resist sheriff’s deputies when they arrive to evict homeowners.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) plans to bring its Home Defenders campaign — unveiled in a handful of cities across the country last month — to the Denver area this Saturday with a rally at the Aurora home of Leonard McWilliams, a disabled Air Force veteran and single parent of three teenagers who has fallen five months behind on his mortgage.

Communities slammed by surge in bank-owned homes

Banks that received government bailout money are taking heat for spending billions of dollars on bonuses, executive pay and lavish outings. But there’s another outrage that Washington seems to be missing: the growing number of bank-owned properties in foreclosure scarring neighborhoods across the country.

Colorado foreclosures to top 200,000 in four years

Nearly 202,000 Colorado homeowners are expected to go into foreclosure by 2013, according to a report by the Center for Responsible Lending, with 60,640 foreclosures taking place just this year.

The hardest hit district? Doug Lamborn’s CD 5 — the home of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway and conservative epicenter of personal responsibility.

Mortgage rescue plan? Let ‘em fail

Still not convinced of the need for a mortgage rescue plan? Read more about foreclosure issues in Colorado.

Bankruptcy is no silver bullet in housing crisis

While packed with carrots encouraging mortgage lenders to modify troubled loans, President Barack Obama’s plan to stem the foreclosure crisis still awaits its stick: the empowerment of bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of primary mortgages.

Advocacy group fights foreclosures in housing court, a lesson for Colorado?

Some Cleveland, Ohio neighborhoods have a message for banks that abandon their foreclosed houses or unload them at fire sale prices to speculators: Stop dumping your trash on us.