Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group (PCRG)

The increasing number of abandoned and vacant foreclosed houses is lowering property values in neighborhoods. These foreclosure properties that remained unsold and unoccupied become eyesores in neighborhoods. Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker has proposed to allow distressed homeowners to remain in their houses by renting the foreclosed properties to them. He said that his Right to Rent proposal would help eradicate the blight in neighborhoods and preserve community and family stability. Read the full article online here.

Underwater mortgages hurt home sales and increase delinquencies and foreclosures. People who have to pay their mortgage holder to sell their homes are less likely to be sellers. A home sold for $200,000 when it has a $250,000 mortgage is a home that the owner may not be able to afford to sell. Read the full article online here.

The head of the federal agency that regulates mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is stepping down. The timing of James Lockhart’s departure from the Federal Housing Finance Agency is not yet certain and a successor hasn’t been named, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because the announcement was not yet formal. Read the full story on Yahoo! News here.

Gov. Ed Rendell today signed a partial 2009-10 state budget that calls for spending $11 billion, allowing most of the state’s 77,000 workers to finally get paid. But he vetoed an even greater amount of proposed spending — $13 billion, including money for state-owned colleges, community colleges, libraries and the state Legislature itself. Read the full Post-Gazette article here.

Many communities will be hosting block parties, cookouts and festivals in celebration of the 26th annual National Night Out Against Crime on Tuesday. Sponsored by the National Association of Town Watch, the goal of Night Out is to raise crime-prevention awareness, increase participation in local anti-crime programs and strengthen police-citizen relationships. Learn more about what events took place around the City of Pittsburgh for this year’s National Night Out by clicking here.

The government’s $50 billion program to ease the foreclosure crisis is helping only a tiny fraction of struggling homeowners. As of July, only 9 percent of eligible borrowers had seen their mortgage payments reduced. And a progress report on the plan Tuesday showed that 10 lenders had not changed a single loan. Read the full article online here.

A proposal for a 16 percent increase in the state income tax is dead because of strong opposition from Western Pennsylvania lawmakers, House Democratic leaders said yesterday. The group of 20 or so conservative Democrats, called the Blue Dogs, “wanted us to take the PIT [personal income tax] increase off the table,” said House Speaker Keith McCall, D-Carbon. “We have taken it off the table.” Read the full story from the Post-Gazette here.

California’s budget debacle holds a lesson for America, but one we will probably ignore. It’s easy to attribute the state’s protracted budget stalemate, now temporarily resolved with about $26 billion of spending cuts and accounting gimmicks, to the deep recession and California’s peculiar politics. Up to a point, that’s true. Representing an eighth of the U.S. economy, California has been harder hit than most states. Read the full Newsweek article here.

If House and Senate conferees aren’t close to a new state budget by Monday, Gov. Ed Rendell will ask the House to enact a $27.1 billion proposal the Senate has already approved, and then he will use a line-item veto to eliminate three-fourths of its expenditures. Read the full Post-Gazette article here.