Home Owners to Lawmakers: Do More to Help Housing

The government isn’t doing enough to help home owners at risk of default, foreclosure, and underwater on their homes, a majority of Americans say in the Home Horizons 2012 study, a survey conducted by Yahoo! Real Estate of 1,500 current and aspiring home owners.
Fifty-one percent of home owners say the government needs to pass more legislation to help home owners who are at risk of losing their house. About two-thirds of Americans surveyed say the government needs to offer more assistance like low-cost loans to help home owners more.
Four out of five adults polled say the 2012 presidential election will have a small or large influence on the housing market, with 43 percent predicting it will have a large impact. However, one-third of those surveyed doubt either party — Republican or Democrat — will have either a positive or negative impact on the real estate market.
“A large-scale government policy that’s going to fix all of this — no one has seen such a thing,” Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow, told Yahoo! Real Estate. “Stabilization in home prices and then a slow upward movement in prices to work down negative equity — that’s a multiyear affair.”
Source: “Yahoo! Study: Home Owners Want Political Action,” Yahoo! Real Estate (Dec. 12, 2011)