The latest federal plan unveiled this week to help homeowners who are sliding toward foreclosure likely won’t help many people in Central Oregon, local credit counselors and banking advocates said.

That’s partly because the offer of a 30-day break from foreclosure proceedings isn’t likely to offer much of a break for people who are 90 days or more behind in their mortgage payments, said Bob Mullins, a money management volunteer for Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Mid-Oregon.

And it’s partly because the tidal wave of foreclosures that is washing over some of the nation’s housing markets is barely lapping at the shores of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, said Bend-based lawyer Chris Ambrose, immediate past president of the Oregon Mortgage Lenders Association.

The National Delinquency Survey produced quarterly by the Washington, D.C.-based Mortgage Bankers Association showed that Oregon ranked 49th in the nation in serious delinquencies — mortgages with payments 90 days or more behind — in the third quarter of 2007, bested only by Wyoming.

Oregon’s serious delinquency rate stood at 1.05 percent of all mortgages, according to the survey. Washington state was slightly higher at 1.12 percent.

The national percentage stood at 2.95 percent, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported, skewed by disastrous numbers from California, Michigan, Ohio and Florida. California alone accounted for as many foreclosure starts in subprime mortgages in the third quarter as 35 other states.

Prodded by statistics like that, the Bush administration this week unveiled a plan called Project Lifeline, touting it as a potential relief for at least some borrowers.

Backed by six of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, including Bank of America and Washington Mutual, the plan calls for offering 30-day breaks from foreclosure proceedings for mortgage holders who are at least 90 days behind to give them more time to work out a solution with their banks.

Under the administration’s plan, lenders won’t be forced to include all borrowers — in fact, anyone who is in bankruptcy or faces foreclosure within a month can’t apply. The banks also will not be required to work out more affordable mortgage options for the borrowers who do go through the program.

In California and Florida, where some borrowers are sliding into foreclosure primarily because their adjustable rate mortgages have reset to unreachable levels, the extra time to find a solution might do some good, Ambrose said.

In Central Oregon

In Oregon, though, subprime lending has not been a significant driver of foreclosure numbers, he said. At least, not yet.

That’s partly because the numbers are relatively low. In Deschutes County, about 5,500 subprime loans were created in 2005 and 2006, according to data compiled under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. In Oregon as a whole, about 95,600 of the 411,376 loans created in those two years — or about 23.25 percent, were considered subprime.

In some parts of California during the same period, the subprime lending rate ran higher than 40 percent.

In Bend, most of the mortgage-related traffic coming through Consumer Credit Counseling Service, a free credit counseling bureau affiliated with the national nonprofit Money Management International, is driven by the same sources of trouble that have always caused mortgage borrowers to get in a bind, Mullins said — the loss of a job, divorce, the death of a key breadwinner, or health problems. And, although the number of loans entering pre-foreclosure proceedings last year in Deschutes County hit at least a 10-year high, the counseling service hasn’t seen a big influx of business.

As a rule of thumb, about 25 percent of the clients who come through the service with debt problems can be helped, Mullins said. But that number tends to run a little higher with people who come in with mortgages, “mostly because we’re still seeing people with normal loan types,” he said.

“I don’t think Bend did quite the same number (of subprime loans), percentage-wise, that the rest of the country did. But, on the other hand, we’re about a year behind everybody else in having all of this hit the fan,” Mullins said. “So what’s happening in other places where it’s at its worst may not hit us for another eight or nine months, if it does.”

In Oregon, Mortgage Bankers Association numbers indicate that about 68 percent of loans that slipped into foreclosure proceedings in the third quarter were either not occupied by their owners, or the borrower had either defaulted on a prior loan modification or had failed to contact the lender altogether.

Across the U.S.

National statistics indicate that lenders are producing significantly more repayment plans and loan modifications in an effort to forestall more foreclosures, Ambrose said, with modifications rising to 236,275 in the third quarter nationally, according to HMDA numbers, compared with 148,785 the year before.

Still, foreclosure waves are devastating some of the nation’s largest markets, including some that have traditionally fed new residents and home buyers to Central Oregon.

Basing its numbers on data from RealtyTrac, the Irvine, Calif., producer of mortgage foreclosure data, The Associated Press reported this week that nearly 50 percent of recent home sales in some California markets came from foreclosed homes. In Nevada, according to the same report, 17.5 percent of all home sales in 2007 stemmed from foreclosures, more than quadruple the number from 2006.

In California as a whole, foreclosure sales accounted for 11.3 percent of all sales, up from 3.7 percent in 2006, according to The AP report.

Heavy waves of foreclosure selling are tending to drive prices down in the hardest-hit states, including California, Nevada, Colorado, Florida and Arizona, as lenders slash prices to get homes off their asset sheets in already glutted markets.

Foreclosure rates in those states are high now because people borrowed too much to pay for high-priced homes during the housing bubble years, the report said. But in other heavily hit states, like Ohio and Michigan, foreclosures have been fueled more by job losses in weakening local economies.