Homeowner help proposed in two stages

WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- The debate in Washington over the mortgage crisis is shifting from assistance for financial operations to steps for helping homeowners, analysts said Monday.

The current strategy proposed by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is to pass a housing bill this week that would provide tax breaks for homeowners and $4 billion for communities to refurbish homes that have been abandoned due to foreclosure.

In the second proposal, which could take months to enact, lenders who participate would reduce principal on mortgages to 85 percent of the home's market value. The Federal Housing Administration would take 5 percent of the new value as a fee and homeowners would use the remaining 10 percent for equity, the paper reported.

"We haven't done much yet," Frank said recently, the Los Angeles Times reported.

But, providing assistance when financial problems sweep across society is not new.

"There's been a long tradition -- dating back well before the New Deal -- of saving the family home or the family farm," Michele Landis Dauber, author of "The Sympathetic State," told the paper.