* Baltimore’s Saint Ambrose Centre have staff for just over 1% of the caseload
* A task of love becomes a nightmare
* Could this be President Obama’s Achilles Heel?

Baltimore’s largest not-for-profit foreclosure-avoidance team at Saint Ambrose Housing Aid Centre have the capacity to take just 1,900 defaulting debtors on board this year, against the 150,000 known troubled Maryland borrowers – that’s already a caseload of 200 a year per consultant.

This should serve as a warning sign to Government that American aid centers nationwide could be in need of aid too.

For Saint Ambrose employees, their job is mainly one of love. They’re not paid well and one has even volunteered. “It’s hard for them,” says Foreclosure-Prevention Director Anne Norton. “My people are caught between a rock and a hard place, in this case between desperate home owners and tough bank officials. The latter’s slow and sometimes ambiguous responses make cases drag on unnecessarily to points where our clients no longer can hang on, and lose their life investments.”

In the good-old bad-old days, obtaining a mortgage was child’s play compared to modifying a mortgage today. Consultants whose mission in life is to counsel and assist have been dragged into paper chases on behalf of clients who have sometimes lost the will to fight.

Obama’s HAMP is set to provide $35 billion’s worth of aid to streamline reduced payments for compliant borrowers. After the first year just 5% of the target population has modified mortgages, with the majority not even on a trial basis.

“The tidal waves just keep rolling in,” laments Norton. “I naively took on the job with no idea that the problem would reach pandemic proportions. I’ve started stress management training for my people and have even thought of panic buttons in the offices.”

I joined her staff around a battered table for a morning meeting. Did they have problems setting boundaries for distressed miracle seekers, she asked. Her staff thought no – the larger problem was not taking work home over weekends. “This used to be my dream job,” said staffer Cara Stretch aged 31. “But now I sometimes can’t even bear to face a client.”

This is worrying officials across the city. If the few scarce troops leave their posts, where to from here?

It’s becoming clear that Obama’s HAMP is running into failure, not because of a lack of funds, and certainly not because of a lack of customers or a lack of concern among government officials. This time there’s a lack of resolve higher up the chain, where office-bound managers just don’t seem to understand the scope of the problem and the need to re-assign staff.

Who’s going to fill the gap? No one at the moment, it seems. Follow the link to www.foreclosuredatabank.com to learn more about what’s rotten in the State of HAMP.

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