The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors on Monday passed a three-pronged strategy to deal with the foreclosure crisis, including acquiring, revamping and selling some of the most blighted structures to new buyers.
The measure passed by an 8-2 vote, following a discussion interspersed with uneasy exchanges between housing staff and supervisors over the details, scope and cost of the plan.
Along with buying up to 10 deteriorating homes for resale, the county will help first-time home buyers get into foreclosed dwellings through a federally funded “Home Equity Loan Program,” which the county anticipates could fill as many as 100 homes. The county will also offer counseling to owners at risk of foreclosure.
The two dissenters — Republican supervisors Pat Herrity and Michael Frey — argue the market was already filling the empty homes without the county’s intervention.
“I’m not sure that we necessarily need to get into the middle of this…and I’m not sure if it’s on the scale of anything that would enable us to stabilize neighborhoods any more than the market already is,” Frey said.
Herrity attacked as overinflated the figure of 3,518 reported foreclosures in the first quarter of 2008, saying that some of the homes have been counted twice or more.
Chairman Gerry Connolly, a Democrat, acknowledged the plan was “uncharted territory.” But he cited the more than 300 people recently arrested in a national mortgage-fraud probe and the collapse and subsequent federal bailout of Bear Stearns as examples of where the market hasn’t worked.
“We have an obligation as a government to see if there is something we can do at this level, to try to shore that up” Connolly said.
The program this year would be paid for by rerouting housing funds, but next fiscal year will require an undetermined infusion of money, according to housing officials. By having the program in place, the county hopes to leverage federal resources when they become available.
Also unclear is whether the homes bought under the program would be spread throughout the county or clustered in the hardest-hit areas.
