Pols praise mortgage program

A local program created this year to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and sheriff's sales is attracting international attention and study from other municipalities who may use the idea.

U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter and Bob Casey Jr. held a hearing in City Hall yesterday to learn more about the Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program and the people it has helped. Specter praised the effort, saying it helps borrowers and lenders while preventing the proliferation of abandoned homes and keeping city property taxes flowing.

Casey put the problem in a national context, saying there are 10,000 foreclosures every weekday in the country. He has urged federal officials to duplicate the local program nationwide.

"We have to do everything possible to do more at the national level to prevent foreclosures," he said.

Specter supports the idea of spreading the program to other municipalities, but called the federal government a "last resort" for fixing the foreclosure crisis.

Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Annette Rizzo, who helped develop the program, told the senators that a television crew from Sweden was in town this week to learn more about the effort. Only owner-occupied residential properties qualify for the program, which sets up a "conciliation conference" with homeowners and lenders to negotiate new terms on mortgages.

Since starting in May, 973 homeowners have participated in the program and 490 properties have been removed from the sheriff's-sale list. Of those, 170 foreclosure cases were settled or discontinued and 235 are still scheduled for conferences.

City Councilman Curtis Jones, who pushed this year for a moratorium on sheriff's sales, called for the federal government to halt all foreclosures for 90 days to allow housing-assistance agencies to develop programs to help.

"The biggest problem we face is fear," he said. "People won't open the mail, won't realize they're in trouble and won't seek help."

Four Philadelphia homeowners - three of them women - told Specter and Casey that the program saved their properties.

The man, a union construction laborer, fell on hard times after he was hurt on the job and his marriage broke up. He said the program helped him with free legal services. He will start paying his mortgage again in December.

"They just got me through with all this," he told the senators.