There are 50,000 people still in their homes, not out on foreclosure, because of state help. That's according to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who spoke on the issue during a news conference Wednesday in Jamestown.
The Attorney General says when he came into office there were 345,000 families facing foreclosure and half of them had not had any lawyer to help them through the process or stave off that foreclosure. Using $100 million from fines levied on banks which behaved badly in the run-up to the crash, he built a network of agencies and groups to help people get mortgage modification.
Schneiderman says one way to do that is with no-interest loans to remove roadblocks to new mortgage arrangements.
"We created...the New York State Mortgage Assistance Program, or MAP, which makes no-interest loans available and this is done through our HOPP counseling or legal services agencies, small no-interest loans available to people. We're talking about very small sums of money that stand in between people and many times their mortgage modifications that can keep them in their homes, seven, eight, ten thousand bucks," said Schneiderman.
The HOPP program involves 90 agencies across the state offering legal assistance and counseling to families facing foreclosure.
Schneiderman says 3,000 of those mortgage modifications through HOPP are in Western New York and the Southern Tier. He says keeping people in their homes is stabilizing neighborhoods.
