I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Though Michigan leads the nation in the number of mortgages being renegotiated under a federal program to prevent foreclosures, the number of homeowners being helped through the program is still vanishingly small. The Detroit Free Press reports on the remarks of a Treasury Department official:
Less than 1% of the homeowners eligible for foreclosure help under President Barack Obama’s Making Home Affordable plan have received permanent loan modifications from their lenders, raising doubts about the program’s results to date and putting more pressure on the administration to get tough with mortgage companies who promised to help struggling borrowers.
Michigan, meanwhile, continues to be a leader in terms of the number of modifications made under the president’s Making Home Affordable plan, with nearly 25,000 so far. But in its report today, the Treasury Department did not reveal how many of those are only trial modifications instead of permanent ones or what percentage of eligible homes in the state that number represents.
There have been 15,237 loan modifications of one kind or another in metro Detroit – 2.1% of the national total. Among metro areas, Detroit’s number of modifications is 10th in the nation, behind New York; Los Angeles; Miami; Riverside, Calif.; Phoenix; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta and Las Vegas.
The problem is that the cooperation of the mortgage companies is not mandatory, it’s voluntary. The report notes that with more than 3.3 million mortgages eligible for the program, lenders had only permanently renegotiated 31,382 of them. There are about 700,000 trial loan modifications, but that’s not translating into permanently modified loans.
Do you know where to vote on Election Day? Do you know what to bring with you? Get comprehensive voter information for your state here.
Sign up for our email newsletter