Almost 15 million people are upside down on their mortgage and very few loan modifications are actually being completed, as a result Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent a letter to the 25 biggest mortgage servicers encouraging them to process more loan modifications. The letter also details a meeting to be held on July 28.  The letter states:  “…there is a general need for servicers to devote substantially more resources to this program for it to fully succeed and achieve the objectives we all share.”

Whether this will be a successful move on Geithner part is still unclear as many lenders are being bombarded with loan modification requests. The completion of a loan modification is not the easiest of tasks leaving many lenders dragging their feet.

In California banks are moving slower to act on mortgage defaults. While defaults increase the number of foreclosure notices have decreased, typically the two work hand in hand.

ForeclosureRadar Chief Executive Sean O’Toole said, “A number of lenders appear to have self-imposed California’s latest foreclosure moratorium on themselves, despite having received an exemption from it.” He is speaking of the California moratorium, which mandates lenders postpone foreclosure auctions notices by 90 days.

Bank of America for example filed 48% fewer notices in June than in May. Its unclear whether lenders simply are overwhelmed by the volume of foreclosures or if there is an effort to slow foreclosures to ease the flood of repossessed properties hitting the market.

It was beginning to seem as though the housing market was stabilizing, but new reports show that a new wave of foreclosure could be here as soon as the end of this summer. Housing prices were beginning to steady thanks mainly to the large amounts of foreclosure properties, but the increase of unemployment is bringing a new surge of foreclosures, according to one report employers shed nearly a half-million jobs in June.

As it has in the past the rise of foreclosures will affect the housing prices leaving more people upside down on their loans.  As it stands now the housing market will be a problem our nation will be dealing with for several years to come.

It seems as though everyone has a take on the recent turns of the housing market and economy including artists. Damon Rich narrows in on New York City and  has brought the situation down to size.

He decided to use the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York, the architectural model built for the 1964 World’s Fair, using pink triangles he has marked where economic troubles are at the worst. “Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two,”this according to a New York Times article.

What is interesting about this project is that it brings together art and politics, but it isn’t stating an opinion on politics its looking at the facts.