Word: isn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...major difficulty now is the weak economy and rising joblessness. Under the U.S. government's plan, a modified loan payment must not account for more than 31% of a family's income. With unemployment north of 10%, in a growing number of cases, the mortgage isn't the problem - the lack of a paycheck is. "It increasingly appears that HAMP is targeted at the housing crisis as it existed six months ago, rather than as it exists right now," concluded the Congressional Oversight Panel, a group charged with evaluating the program, in an October report...
Still, the larger storm cloud on the horizon is the state of the jobs market. While an out-of-work person can, theoretically, get a loan modification under HAMP by proving eligibility for at least nine months of unemployment benefits, the program isn't set up to handle someone without a regular stream of income...
Rising unemployment isn't the only dynamic HAMP fails to thoroughly take into account...
...deal with - people who wouldn't be in a position to keep their houses even with a modification. Emily Jones, a manager at Neighborhood Housing Services in Boise, Idaho, says about half of all people who walk into her housing-counseling agency fall into that camp. "The goal isn't to keep the home in every situation," she says. "The goal is to avoid foreclosure, and in a lot of situations, it's not in the client's best interest to try to keep the home and only postpone the inevitable." (Read "FHA: Housing's Safety Net Begins to Fray...
...bottom 1% of America's schools - approximately 5,000 of them - over the next five years. While he has since dialed back the scope of the project (the Education Department now expects the funds to tackle 1,200 or so schools), the objective remains the same. "My goal isn't quantity but quality," Duncan told TIME in July. "That bottom 1% are made up of dropout factories, where 50, 60, 75% of kids are dropping out. Change around the edges isn't going to get us where we need...