Housing foreclosures don't stop for the holidays

Last month, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced to great fanfare that they would hold off on foreclosures and evictions during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and January 9.

But as reporter Mary Kane -- who contributed to Southern Exposure's award-winning investigations into predatory lending in 2003 -- reveals in a moving piece in The Washington Independent, the foreclosure machine continues to grind on.

The foreclosure moratorium was hailed as "a giant timeout" to help keep people in their homes. Fannie and Freddie had also unveiled a plan to modify troubled mortgages, and banks like J.P Morgan and Bank of America also suspended foreclosures.

 But as Kane reveals, the foreclosures keep coming:

Fannie's and Freddie's holiday program, for example, applies only tonew foreclosures, not those already in the pipeline, which is full.Some 765,558 properties received default notices, or were foreclosedon, during the third quarter, a new record, RealtyTrac figures show.And while the two mortgage giants together own or guarantee $5 trillionof the nation's mortgages, they don't hold most of the riskiestsubprime loans at the heart of the housing crisis. That means theirsuspension program is likely to affect only a small percentage of homeowners facing foreclosure.

Kane gives a human face to the tragedy, offering a video that takes readers to the scene of a foreclosure in a working-class Virginia suburb:

Unfortunately, such scenes are only going to increase unless there is drastic government action: As the Wall Street Journal revealed this week, the number of delinquent mortgages nationally is set to double in 2009.