Downturn In Housing Market Update

On this website is a story on how Citigroup bank is going to put in effect it plan to help unemployed homeowners keep their home. The plan or program is called Homeowner Unemployment Assistance Program. This program is going to lower the monthly payments of some homeowner’s average mortgage payment to $500 a month. It will only be lowered to this average for three months.

This article contains information on how the Stimulus Bill will help fix the economy by fixing the housing market. It will include substantial affordable housing investments. In this story it shows how the $300 million dollars of the stimulus bill will go to help out Minnesota


This website expresses it feeling on hoping that the market will bounce back from Monday’s downfall. On Monday the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped below 7,000 and continued its free fall to close below 6,800 (a level not seen in 12 years). The housing sector is still hurting according to the National Association of Realtors. Home sales for the month of January went down 5.3% while the mortgage delinquencies went up 53%.

ListServ Update

What I have found on the computer has been somewhat if not very helpful to me. When I first started to research information, I had a lot of trouble. Their was so many Listservs that had absolutly nothing to do with my topic. But finally I found something that was in tune with my topic, which is "The Downturn In The Housing Market".

Two of the most helpful Listservs that I found were: Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and the Hudlist for Mortgage Brokers. These listServs had the most informative information on them. They are, in my veiw so far, the best ones for my topic.

The ListServ for the OFHEO deals with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) which regulates Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks. On this ListServs I recieve e-mails that contain Speeches about different ways in how people, like the Director of Federal Housing Finance Agency, feels that the Goverment needs to do to make or the progress in the housing market economy. Also there are a few important links that take me to other websites in which I can view more info about my topic.

The Hudlist for Mortgage Brokers give a basic list of the typical prices of homes in the state of Washington. These are helpful because I can look into their archives and see the rise of the "Housing Bubble" for their state. They also have links were I can recieve other info about the housing prices in other states. With this information I can use with the other information from the previous websites and get a whole new understanding of how the housing market decreased over the past couple of years.

Topic Due 2/5/09 Update

Off the bat let me tell you what I'm going to discuss in my topic paper. The headline of my topic is the "Downturn in the Housing Sector Overall". My goal is to find out why the real estate business as a whole has decreased like it has. I want to know what the foundation at the base of this problem is. So far what I've discovered is that this so called "bubble" has burst. Honestly I really don't have a full understanding of what this bubble concept represents. But of this concept what I do understand, to my knowledge, is that this bubble represents the rising price tags that the realtors put on homes and properties. When people stopped buying homes and properties because of the rising prices this bubble burst. I know my explanation of the bubble concept might not seem as elementary as 1, 2, and 3 but then again I haven’t gotten full knowledge of this theory/concept. Also this bubble concept or bubble bursting didn't affect just the U.S; it has effect the continent of Europe. What I can say is that I'm finding a lot more info on Google Advanced, Yahoo, and Salon.com than I did on Google Scholar.

Color of Money Reaction

I'm not sure if you have ever read the series called "Color of Money", but if you have I'm pretty sure you would agree with me in saying that it is very astonishing how blacks of equal qualifications as whites were denied loans for a house. I mean it was 1988 you would think that by then when it comes to money the only color is green but I guess not. This series is news worthy because it shows that only 21 years ago racism against blacks was still present, it just came in a different form. It makes you wonder if the banks in Atlanta or other cities are still doing this. I feel that this information could have been obtain w/o computer use b/c if the banks didn't have computers they still would've had to record where and to who the loans were being given to. The only thing that could've made this story better is if the mayor himself was denied a loan for his house.

Blog #1

My name is Leonard, of course you know that because of the title, but I'm currently a student majoring in Mass Communications. My goal that I plan to reach at the end of this journey is to be a sports analyst for ESPN.