Starting at around noon (eastern) on Sunday, June 7th and continuing through noon on Tuesday, June 9th, we'll be live blogging from the National Fair Housing Alliance's annual conference. This year's conference, entitled "Fair Housing in the 21st Century: Realizing a More Perfect Union" (link to agenda, .pdf) is taking place at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill.

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1:17pm - Lunch keynote speaker Loretta King, the acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, opens by applauding the collabortion between NFHA and DOJ and recognizing the many DOJ staffers who are in the audience. She then asks who in the audience can truly say that throughout their lifetimes has truly lived in integrated housing. Just one person raises their hand.

1:21pm - King notes, "Since January 2009, we have significantly enhanced our enforcement efforts, and yes I am here to brag about it." DOJ has filed 16 fair housing act cases already this calendar year.

1:29pm - King turns to a type of discrimination that "gets her goat" - sexual harassment by landlords. She details a $1.1m judgement against a Kansas City landlord who coerced tenants into having sex with him to continue living there. It is the largest fair housing verdict in the history of the DOJ Fair Housing Division. She then tells of a landlord who fled to Panama to avoid service on a sexual harassment fair housing suit, but DOJ tracked him down (applause from the room...).

1:36pm - Discussing the Bloch case out of Chicago (which directly challenges the Halperin decision; a Jewish family was fined by their condo board for having a mezzuzah on their doorframe), she details the allegations and how DOJ's Steve Rosenbaum argued before the court that the fair housing act should apply both during the acquisition of housing and after someone begins living in the housing.

Loretta King, Department of Justice

1:51pm - King applauds her staff who "have been waiting for this wonderful day", and notes that they will be vigorously enforcing all federal civil rgiths laws. She notes they have filed 16 cases and are developing many many more with a team of just 40 employees.

2:38pm - After a post-lunch break, NFHA's Lisa Rice introduces the first panel discussion of the afternoon, entitled "Foreclosure Prevention: Preserving and Stabilizing America's Neighborhoods". William Apgar, the Senior Advisor for Mortgage Finance at HUD is the only speaker so far; Michael Barr of the Treasury Dept, their assistanct secretary for Financial Institutions, was unable to attend but is sending a replacement (who has not yet arrived).

2:43pm - Apgar begins by framing the Making Home Affordable intiative as part of a larger Obama administration housing plan, and just a few minutes later Barr's replacement Seth Wheeler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Federal Finance for the Treasury, arrives and Apgar passes the podium to him.

2:48pm - Seth notes that there are 15 servicers participating in the program so far, and that to date there has been about 150k mods extended but they are unsure of how many have been finalized. He notes that the first of the loan reports will be coming to Treasury by the end of June and they expect to have better numbers by the end of the summer. He states that there is still alot of confusion about who is participating and exactly what participation means in each case. He hopes that these are not uniform problems but rather the execption to the rule. He says their focus right now is on "implementation, implementation, implementation."

2:53pm - "We're not going to get through this crisis until we have worked through some of these [housing and foreclosure] problems."

2:54pm - Apgar returns to the podium and says that we all know that this crisis is having a disparate impact on communities of color. "This was an accident waiting to happen... There was no doubt that people were taking on loans that they neither understood nor could afford to pay."

3:02pm - After detailing the many barriers and challenges to dealing effectively with the mortgage crisis, Apgar notes that there is still much work to do with the Hope for Homeowners program. He says that some of the investors are finally coming around to the idea that writing down some of the mortgages might be the right option, and if this idea takes hold there will be significant relief for many homeowners.

William Apgar, HUD

3:05pm - Apgar emphasizes that the two key elements of any of these programs are accountability and transparency, and that advocates are focusing on ensuring that those who have been disporportionally affected by this crisis are not ignored. He thinks that reporting on these programs is key, but that capturing the info about race and ethnicity on mortgage modifications is hard to do. They have clear authority to capture this data on originations and refinancing, but that figuring out a way to compel reporting in modifications has been a challenge.

3:10pm - Once obtaining the data is nailed down, Apgar says the next challenge is how much of it is shared. He hopes to release both aggregate and loan level data as well as regional and local data. He says that this data is going to be a key evaluative tool for the programs at a federal level. 

3:12pm - Apgar references that Donovan is rooted in an evidence-based approach, not a theory-based approach.

3:15pm - The panel opens up for questions, and moderator Rice kicks things off by asking about the incentive for some lenders not to modify loans because of derivative products. She understands that there are now some incentives for lenders who may be in the position to modify more loans, but she would like for more details about how it works.

3:16pm - Apgar responds first by saying that he disagrees with the underlying idea that the programs aren't having an impact on the number of foreclosures, and that there is no way to gauge how bad things would be now w/o the programs. Seth adds that the Making Home Affordable plan was premised on providing significant incentives to services and lenders and then gives some details about lender tests and loan mods that this blogger doesn't fully understand... Apgar says that this is a mess that everyone wants to put behind them and that they're all waiting for the best, final offer. He thinks some of them may be realizing it is time to accept their losses and move on.

3:27pm - I ask the panel if their standard for data sharing is going to be that they release everything that they are legally empowered to release or some other standard. Apgar responds that the answer must be cautious as there is an evolving legal theory that empowers the government to mandate the collection of this data in the first place. He also notes that there will be great depth to the data that is being collected, and that they want to be protective of privacy issues and avoid just handing marketers some amazing lists. He concludes by noting that there is going to be significant data sharing across government agencies and with law enforcement.

3:38pm - The first panel concludes and Rice does a quick introduction of the next set of panelists: Michael Calhoun of the Center for Responsible Lending, Janis Bowdler of NCLR, Allen Jones of Bank of America, and Deborah Goldberg of NFHA.

Michael Calhoun, Center for Responsible Lending

3:42pm - Calhoun takes the podium first and notes that one of out 8 mortgages in the country were in foreclosure or more than 90 days delinquent and the "cure" rate for mortgages that are delinquent is far lower than it has been in the past. Almost half of all mortgages of recent years for African Americans and Latinos were subprime, and the estimates are that roughly half of those borrowers will lose their homes.

3:50pm - Bowdler takes the podium and notes that they are focusing on individual counseling, which grew out of program in Phoenix in which the counseling piece of the program was seen as more beneficial than the downpayment assistance that was also offered. She notes that generic education pieces don't work for the Latino community - but one-on-one counseling does.

4:00pm - Bowdler notes that their network of counselors has an enormous demand placed on them - as they have helped the Latino community understand that it is important to obtain counseling they have not yet secured the funding to ensure that will keep the programs sustainable. She is concerned that as counseling services shrink or are unable to meet the market demand that mortgage rescue scams will move into that gap.

4:05pm - Jones takes the podium, noting that he works on their servicing team in Washington D.C. He offers to stay all day and listen to every question - and that he brought lots of business cards : )

4:08pm - Jones speaks about BoA's "clarity committment", available on most new mortgages, which is a summary document of one page that includes all of the critical info associated with obtaining a loan and is provided with both the good faith estimate and at closing. They've also launched a new web guide that is a personalized simulation of the home loan process.

4:17pm - As part of the Making Home Affordable, BoA has sent out more than 100,000 trial offers and has received more than 20,000 responses.

4:20pm - It strikes me that the BoA representative is almost trying to convince a room of very skeptical folks that they aren't the enemy but rather something closer to an ally or partner. He's citing a laundry list of stats, figures, and new programs. Hard to judge how his message is being received, I'm at the back of the room.

4:23pm - Goldberg is the final speaker on the panel, and says that her focus will be on how the obligation to affirmatively furthering fair housing fits into all this. She first notes that it is important to remember this obligation goes beyond just HUD but to all financial regulation entities, and that it goes beyond just eliminating discrimination but "how do we open those doors" that had been previously closed.

Deborah Goldberg, NFHA

4:27pm - Section 805 (or 3605) of the Fair Housing Act lays the groundwork for this obligation, saying that anything that is secured by residential real estate is covered, and that 808d (or 3608d) spells out the responsibility of HUD to administer the act and how it applies to other agencies. Then a series of executive orders, most importantly 12892, reiterate that the notion of "affirmatively furthering" goes beyond just HUD and that it this obligation applies to a wide variety of agencies.

4:33pm - Golbderg highlights the lending-related recomendations from the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (whose Chicago hearing we live blogged here). You can read the full Commission report here.

4:39pm - The panel wraps up and opens for questions. The first is for Bowdler and Jones and centers on the barriers that the hearing impaired community read and understand english in a very different way and how is this being addressed in the home retention / modification side of things. (Editor's note: unfortunately, I had to step out and missed the answer...)

4:45pm - In response to a question about financial institutions voluntarily paying for counseling services or mandating that they pay for such services, Bowdler notes that they have one contract and are certainly open to expanding things. She notes that the $100 or $150/phone call that they might receive only covers the cost of outreach and an initial phone call but nothing more substantive. She critizes the fact that the lender is receiving $2,500+ as an incentive for modifying a loan but there's no per/mod funding available for the housing counseling agencies that are doing much of the hard, on-the-ground work.

4:51pm - A comment from the audience that the federal regulatory agencies should add a requirement to recipients of fed money that they self-test (using NFHA or qualified fair housing organization testers, of course) to ensure that there is no product steering or disparate terms and conditions offered.

4:57pm - Wrapping up the blog coverage for today, although will include any highlights from this evening's cocktail reception in tomorrow's post.