Having lived nearly all my life in Pennsylvania and California prior to last year settling on Montana for the rest of it, I couldn’t help but notice two very different approaches the states have for helping homeowners avoid foreclosures. First, from MarketWatch comes this story about the remarkable success of a program that’s been in place for over 25 years:

As Republicans try to kill an Obama administration foreclosure prevention program that even Democrats agree hasn’t lived up to expectations, a program in Pennsylvania is being lauded for being simpler, cheaper and more effective.

It’s called the Pennsylvania Homeowners Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program and was established in 1984, long before the recent mortgage crisis. The program gives bridge loans to people who have recently lost their jobs. Loans do not accrue interest until the participant’s income is restored.

But, in the Golden State there is now a very different approach being talked about in Sacramento, details provided in this report at the Wall Street Journal Real Estate blog:

Some California lawmakers, supported by unions and left-leaning activist groups, have an idea to help stem the flow of foreclosures: Charge banks $20,000 every time they want to foreclose on a home.

The proposed new fee, which has been dubbed a “Foreclosure Mitigation Fee,” would offset the roughly $19,229 in costs for property maintenance, inspections, increased police and other public safety presence and lost property tax revenues from each blighted foreclosure.

My guess is that, if enacted, the California program will have poor results over the long-term, however, that hasn’t stopped the legislature before, so, there’s little reason to think that it would now.

Standard & Poor’s reported home prices continued to fall in February, down a whopping 1.1 percent on an unadjusted basis but just  0.2 percent lower when seasonal factors are taken into account. As would be expected, the year-over-year changes for the raw vs. adjusted data are almost identical – down 3.3 percent from  a year ago – but there’s quite a difference between the two data sets on a monthly basis as shown below.

Note: This chart should be alternating between two data sets – if it’s not go here.

Not surprisingly, the Washington D.C. area housing market is booming (right along with the level of deficit spending) and it was the only housing market to see price increases last month (up 0.2 percent SA) and from a year ago (up 2.7 percent). Elsewhere, home values are about back to the 2009 low with prices in Atlanta, Cleveland, Las Vegas, and Detroit now below the level seen in 2000 with Phoenix likely to join that group in the months ahead.

The Commerce Department reported(.pdf) that new home sales rose 11.1 percent in March, spurring a number of hopeful headlines in the mainstream financial media and no doubt giving a goodly number of realtors and homebuilders a dash of renewed vigor, but, they might want to keep the bubbly stored safely away.

The increase to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 300,000 units last month after a drop of 13.5 percent in February leaves the current sales rate just 11 percent above the all-time low reached in, well, February. This puts the sales total a full 78 percent below the peak reached back in 2005 and about one-third the pre-housing bubble average level.

The inventory of unsold homes fell from 8.2 months of supply in February to 7.3 months in March, but, does anyone really care anymore?

The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes rose 3.7 percent last month, from an upwardly revised annual rate of 4.92 million in February to a rate of 5.10 million in March, amid a record 35 percent all-cash purchases and the highest share of distressed sales in almost two years at 40 percent.

Tighter lending standards continue to make it difficult for prospective buyers as falling home prices and historically low mortgage rates have combined to push the trade group’s housing affordability index to just 13 percent of gross income, its lowest level in 41 years.

The median home price rose 2.2 percent in March to $159,600, however, home values have fallen 5.9 percent from a year ago, consistent with most other home price indexes.

The inventory of unsold homes rose 1.1 percent to 3.549 million units, but the increased sales volume pushed the months of supply metric down from 8.5 months to 8.4 months, still more than 50 percent above normal, that is, if anyone still remembers what “normal” is for the U.S. housing market.