May 15th, 2009
Real Estate Professors Offer Plan to Prevent Foreclosure of Nearly One Million Households
Three professors of real estate and urban land economics at the Wisconsin School of Business have developed a proposal aimed at preventing homeowners nationally from defaulting on their mortgages.
Dubbed the “Wisconsin Foreclosure and Unemployment Relief Plan” (WI-FUR), it would expand and combine two established programs—unemployment insurance and housing vouchers—to provide immediate relief and prevent a new wave of foreclosures of recently unemployed workers.
Morris Davis, Stephen Malpezzi and François Ortalo-Magné believe their plan could prevent about one million households from entering foreclosure. The essence of the WI-FUR plan is to attach a housing “voucher” to each unemployment check to be directly applied to a mortgage payment.
Read more about the Wisconsin Foreclosure and Unemployment Relief Plan.