Tag: Foreclosures

VAIL -- Last year saw a new record number of foreclosures in Vail, Beaver Creek and surrounding Eagle County, but it also saw a significant increase in home sales over 2009, which may wind up being the low mark in a mountain real estate crash unlike anything since the 1980s. Counties throughout the high country -- from Pitkin (Aspen) to Routt (Steamboat) to San Miguel (Telluride) – all set new records for the number of foreclosures, according to the Denver Post, surpassing dubious marks all established in the 1980s.

The case is now famous. The homeowner had applied for the Home Affordable Mortgage Program, or HAMP, an Obama administration initiative to give distressed and tapped-out borrowers lower monthly payments. But this “HAMPlicant,” the writer on the blog Calculated Risk noted, had given up on a $1,880 a month mortgage and spent hundreds of dollars instead at a spa, tanning salon, gourmet grocery store and liquor store, capping it all off with $1,700 in charges to mall stores from Baby Gap to Best Buy. She's what bloggers are calling a "foreclosure queen."

Just in time for your holiday listening pleasure, two songs are making their way around the blogosphere, marking another year of falling home prices...

It took a little longer, but the bursting of the real estate bubble across the country over the last two years is now ravaging...

Dug up fresh, daily. MILLIONAIRE GRASSROOTS ACTION: "These aren't just some organizations that these guys gave money to. They run them...!" The "grassroots" efforts to defeat...

WASHINGTON-- As new foreclosure notices reach the troubling milestone of 10,000 per day across the nation, it is increasingly clear that measures taken so far to turn back the tide have failed. This week, a number of officials here have signaled that they have decided to support a shift in strategy.

Anthony Suau, who cut his photographic teeth and won a Pulitzer Prize at The Denver Post in the 1980s, took top honors at the World Press Photo competition, the organization announced Friday. The black-and-white photo Suau shot in March for TIME magazine shows an armed Cuyahoga County sheriff's deputy clearing a debris-strewn Cleveland home whose owners were evicted after losing the home to foreclosure. The winning photo is part of a story -- which also took second place in the WPP's Daily Life category -- commissioned by TIME but published online only. It's the second time Suau has won the WPP's top prize.

Congressional Democrats hoping to use the economic stimulus package to force lenders to refinance troubled mortgages have met an unlikely opponent: President Barack Obama. Many Democrats, including Obama, have long-supported the strategy of empowering bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of primary mortgages to prevent foreclosures. But White House officials have said they don’t want the bankruptcy provision in the stimulus bill for fear of alienating Republicans, most of whom oppose the change.

When the government announced in November that it would use mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to streamline loan modifications for possibly hundreds of thousands of borrowers, officials billed the idea as a fast-track program to fight foreclosures. What no one mentioned is that homeowners would have to sign away their rights to sue, if they wanted to get those loans modified.

Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter is holding a telephone town hall with constituents about the economy, financial crisis and plans for economic relief.