For example, a Treasury Department effort started in early 2010 allows the jobless to postpone mortgage payments for three months, but the average length of unemployment is now nine months. As of March 31, there were only 7,397 participants.
“So far, I think the public record will show that programs to help unemployed homeowners have not been very successful,’’ said Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, an executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Data released last week suggest that the administration’s task is growing more difficult as the problems created by unemployment and housing trends persist. New job growth in May was anemic, and unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.
Last week, a widely watched index found that housing prices had dropped to their lowest level in nearly a decade. And while the rate of homes falling into foreclosure has slowed, the reason is delays in processing foreclosures, not a housing recovery, according to RealtyTrac, a company that tracks foreclosures. There were 219,258 foreclosure filings in April, the latest month available.
Critics of the Obama administration’s approach to preventing foreclosures have pressed for two years to get officials to focus more on unemployed homeowners, with meager results. As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion.
Morris A. Davis, a former Federal Reserve economist, estimates that as many as a million homeowners slipped into foreclosure because of insufficient help for the unemployed.
“The money was there and they didn’t spend it,’’ said Davis, an associate real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin. “I don’t mean to sound outraged, but I am pretty outraged.’’
