Word: florida
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...throughout the country, cities are anxiously awaiting the arrival of federal funds - including a $4 billion housing stimulus jolt just signed by the President - to assist with the foreclosure crisis. The hope is that the federal injection of funds will help homeowners struggling to make mortgage payments. In South Florida, one of the worst hit areas of the country, the help can't come soon enough. And one local government is already off to a fast start in dealing with the wide variety of foreclosure hardships that make up the crisis...
Johnson and Frankel are waiting for more money from the stimulus bill package to trickle down, though Johnson fears bureaucratic delays. That means many of the people who need help won't get it through this bill, says Brad Hunter, director of the South Florida market of MetroStudy, a housing market research firm. The confusing, work-in-progress package, for example, is supposed to help first-time homeowners but won't help those who have already lost their homes...
...housing stimulus funds may not be enough to deal with what Hunter says are more troubles set to crash on the market next year. That is when soaring interest rates are triggered, affecting borrowers in real estate hot spots-turned-problem areas such as Florida and California who signed up for negative amortization loans. A clause in many of those loans calls for them to be reset if the home's value drops a certain percentage below the loan's amount. "There quite easily could be a doubling of a monthly payment," he says...
...Florida, four years later it was Ohio - could the decisive swing state in the 2008 presidential election be Colorado? Recent polls indicate that the question of whether the Centennial State's nine electoral college votes will go to Barack Obama or John McCain is too close to call. The state has become increasingly competitive over the past decade: President George W. Bush carried it by 9% in 2000, but four years later John Kerry slashed that margin almost in half...
Despite his backslapping reputation, McCain will play rough if he thinks it will help him win. During the Florida primary, he charged, dubiously, that his chief rival for the nomination, Mitt Romney, supported a "timetable" for withdrawal from Iraq, a claim based on a misreading of a single quote. More recently, he claimed in a television commercial that Obama canceled a visit to wounded troops because television cameras were not allowed. The charge lacked evidence, but it still managed to knock the Obama campaign off message. "The status quo means McCain loses. He's got to change things," says Peter...