BUILDER Online's Housing Headlines

The unpaid bills range from the ordinary property taxes to those collected from special taxing districts, also known as Mello Roos districts, used to create infrastructure in new-growth areas.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sound like a homely mid-Western couple - dependable, perhaps slightly dull.

But these two almost destroyed the US housing market and their downfall was the overture to the global financial crisis.

It is a reprise of the Home Run Program, backed by former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., that advocates say helped spur the sale of 1,625 new homes worth nearly $377 million.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said Friday he’ll use $8 million in federal stimulus funds to help kick start the state’s sluggish housing market.

He plucks out one motion and leafs through: a Deutsche Bank representative signed an affidavit claiming to be the vice president of two different banks. His office was in Kansas City, Mo., but the signature was notarized in Texas. And the bank did not even own the mortgage when it began to foreclose on the homeowner.

The judge’s lips pucker as if he had inhaled a pickle; he rejected this one.

“I’m a little guy in Brooklyn who doesn’t belong to their country clubs, what can I tell you?” he says, adding a shrug for punctuation. “I won’t accept their comedy of errors.”

The Rancho Cucamonga center, in what is one of regions worst hit by foreclosures in the nation, has been the busiest site for Chase. “The center does double the loan modification submissions than any other in the country,” said Rod Tawasha, home preservation manager.

President George W. Bush, with less than five months to go in his presidency, said taking over Fannie and Freddie would be “critical to returning the economy to stronger sustained growth.”

It turned out to be the beginning of something much more dire — far beyond a correction, far beyond even a garden-variety recession, far beyond anything most people had lived through.

What it turned out to be was the beginning of five weeks that shook the American financial system to its foundations. The stock market convulsed. Wall Street itself was redrawn. The word “depression” was suddenly on everyone’s lips.

One year later, the economy is only now beginning to show signs — tentative at that — of pulling out of the Great Recession, the longest economic contraction since World War II. The Dow, while still more than 30 percent off its peak, is no longer the source of a daily national ulcer.

The former CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp. is asking for the dismissal of the federal government’s civil-fraud case against him, citing distorted evidence and the omission of company disclosures, according to a published report.