The federal government doesn't have all the answers for the economic crisis that's really hitting home.

Local efforts, however, have a different, more immediate take on the issue.

That's because the housing crisis isn't only affecting those who lose homes, but also their neighbors, communities and municipalities who suffer the fallout. Keeping home owners in their homes allows them to build and spend equity and contribute to the stability and fiscal health of their communities, according to the Pew Charitable Trust's "Defaulting on the Dream" an analysis of the current housing crisis and state-level responses.

The Brookings Institution also recognized the significance of the local market dynamic more than a year ago in what could be considered the framework for a United Metros of America.

The report, "Blueprint For American Prosperity" says more and more often, large metropolitan areas, not the federal government, are at the forefront of social change, quickly addressing housing policies, sprawl, sustainable development, education, immigration, infrastructure, energy independence, technological innovation, global warming and a host of other pressing social concerns.

Perhaps no where is that more true than on the home front. In many cases, struggling home owners need look no further than their own backyard community for relief.

Hearkening back to WWW II industrialist Henry J. Kaiser's affordable housing communities, Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council offers an Employer-Assisted Housing program that includes 60 employers offering down payments, rent, savings assistance and home ownership education to thousands of employees. Program leaders say the feds aren't doing enough.

Federal agencies in September finally began doling out $3.92 billion in new Neighborhood Stabilization Grants (See what your community will get), once rejected by President Bush, but signed into law under Title III of the Housing And Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA). The grants are designed to help local governments acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise become sources of abandonment and blight within their communities.

"These Neighborhood Stabilization Grants provide limited resources enough to recover just a fraction of the more than 30,000 properties that have been foreclosed upon in metropolitan Chicago since 2007," said Robin Snyderman, vice president of the Chicago area council's Housing & Community Development.

Check with your employer, local redevelopment and planning agencies, metro government, business groups, community efforts and social programs for employer assisted housing.

Downtown San Jose, CA's redevelopment vision of a more vibrant city core included a building frenzy of first-time-for-the area, high-rise condos with ground floor shopping, retail services and other amenities in the mix. But failing sales -- zero sales for some properties -- led builders to convert many of the empty units to rentals. With an average rent of nearly $1,700 in the Silicon Valley area, according to RealFacts.com, rents can be far from affordable, but the conversions do add more rental units to an economically thriving region that's often short on housing.

As the housing bust ensued, rental housing in many hard hit areas has become cheaper or at least more negotiable due to a glut of unsold speculative condos and other properties converted to rentals.

Consider your position when the market springs back to life if you are already nesting in a full-featured home, rather than an apartment. It's not out of the question to negotiate a lease-option deal with the builder.

Down the road, in Gilroy, CA, long before home ownership counseling was de rigueur for certain loans, mortgage assistance programs, bankruptcy law and bailout legislation, South County Housing was doling out a heavy curriculum of home ownership studies along with sweat-equity programs and loans that look a lot like subprime mortgages.

However, thanks to smarts that largely Latino buyers receive, foreclosure rates hover around zero, belying rates in the rest of the foreclosure-hammered Golden State.

Seek accredited home ownership counseling now and prepare in advance for your own home. There's a lot of counseling going around these days and, apparently, even the feds seem to understand the local angle.

In October, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) doled out, to more than 2,300 local housing counseling agencies, $50 million in housing counseling training and housing counseling grants for first-time home buyers.

Portland's elected regional Metro government has the authority to coordinate land use across several local jurisdictions and is currently focused on integrating housing choices and affordability into policymaking and funding allocations, better evaluating land use impacts of transportation investments, and safeguarding regionally significant natural areas. Seek out your regional agency, if available, and ask about their housing policies.

In "Facilitating Shared Appreciation Mortgages to Prevent Housing Crashes and Affordability Crises" the Brookings Institution recently foretold of today's affordability and credit crises and made the case for equity sharing or "shared appreciation mortgages" (SAMs) as a creative financing tool whose time as come.

Too little light has been shed on now-available federally insured SAMs available from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) yet another element of the HERA legislation.

The program should give SAMs a higher profile, but with the growing group of SAM facilitators, private SAMs can be available locally without federal originating restrictions.

For more help, see: "Foreclosure Prevention Efforts Grow".

Published: October 23, 2008

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.