Mortgage settlement funds can't come soon enough!

RealtyTrac's March 2012 Foreclosure Rate Heat Map shows that Arizona had the highest foreclosure rate in the country last month. There were 9,497 foreclosure filings in Arizona in March 2012. This means 1 in every 300 homeowners received a foreclosure filing last month, more than twice the national average of 1 in every 662 homeowners.

The Arizona Attorney General's office will soon receive almost $98 million as part of the $25 billion settlement reached with the 5 largest banks and 49 state's Attorneys' Generals. The agreement settles state and federal investigations finding that the country’s five largest loan servicers engaged in unacceptable and sometimes fraudulent mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices. Arizona's settlement stipulates that the funds should be used for foreclosure prevention and mitigation programs. 

Until we solve our foreclosure problem, Arizona will not see economic recovery. 

The settlement funds can't come soon enough. 

Housing Is Health!

A spate of recent activity has highlighted the link between housing and health. 

 

The Center for Housing Policy's Impacts of Affordable Housing on Health summarizes that residential instability leads to mental health problems, elevated stress, and even hypertension and heart disease. Stable, affordable housing provides a platform for people to manage their chronic diseases.

A study of HUD's Moving to Opportunity program, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that women who used housing vouchers to move to lower poverty neighborhoods had lower obesity and diabetes rates. 

 

The Center for Disease Control's Health Impact Pyramid, shown below, places socioeconomic factors, such as housing, at the base of healthy interventions that have the largest impact. 

Funders are also catching on to the link between housing and health. An article in the Worcester (MA) Telegram tells how The Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts put the Health Impact Pyramid into action. They funded "Housing First" models to address homelessness in their community and were recognized by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness as the first city of its size to end chronic homelessness. 

Intuitively, it always made sense that affordable housing can make us healthier; and now we have the research to back us up.