President Obama outlined three proposals to address America’s struggling housing market today in Nevada, the state with the nation’s second highest foreclosure rate. Ahead of the speech, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney circulated a release hitting Obama’s housing record, including a graphic criticizing the president for roughly the 3 million foreclosures and a high unemployment rate that have occurred since he took office in 2009:

Romney’s criticism is odd, considering the candidate’s only elucidated housing proposal was telling homeowners, “Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit bottom.” That Romney said it in Nevada, a state that has been among the tops for foreclosures since the crisis, made his policy prescription even more remarkable — and it earned him strong rebukes from Nevada’s Republican governor and several of the state’s Republican lawmakers. And even though Romney’s economic plan had 59 points — none was related to housing.

The foreclosure crisis Romney blames on Obama, meanwhile, started well before he took office, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis that started the Great Recession. High unemployment — which Romney again blames on Obama — was largely a result of that crisis, and though Romney has continually slammed Obama for making the economy worse, he and his campaign have yet to substantiate those claims.

Millions of Americans have been slammed by the decline in housing prices and the foreclosure crisis that followed the 2008 financial collapse, but a new report from First Focus and the Brookings Institution shows that there is one group of victims that has largely been ignored. According to the report, more than 8.3 million children are directly affected by the ongoing crisis, as single-family homes and rental properties continue to enter foreclosure.

Children have been “the invisible victims” of the crisis, but 2.3 million have already been directly affected by foreclosure. An estimated six million are in high-risk foreclosure situations, as the chart below shows:

Between 12 and 19 percent of children are in at-risk situations in California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, and more than half a million children have gone through foreclosure in California alone. In six other states — Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, and Rhode Island — between 8 and 10 percent of children are at-risk. But even these estimates are “conservative,” the report says, as it examined mortgage data from 2004-2008 and is based on loan status as of February 2011. The actual numbers could be much higher.

The number of children living in poverty, exacerbated by the effects of the Great Recession, reached 15.7 million in 2011, and the number of homeless children has risen 33 percent in the last three years. The foreclosure crisis has contributed to that, placing children at a higher risk of entering poverty, and as the U.S. Census noted, “Children who live in poverty…are more likely than their peers to have cognitive and behavioral difficulties, to complete fewer years of education, and, as they grow up, to experience more years of unemployment.”

During comments overheard by an NBC news reporter, Mitt Romney told a crowd at a private fundraiser last night that he might eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development, scale back the Department of Education, and eliminate some specific tax provisions. There are all details that he has refused to divulge on the campaign trail:

Romney went into a level of detail not usually seen by the public in the speech, which was overheard by reporters on a sidewalk below. One possibility floated by Romney included the elimination of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Cabinet-level agency once led by Romney’s father, George.

“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later.

Regarding taxes, Romney said, “I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction.” He also said that he would “likely eliminate deductions for state income and property taxes.” The campaign is already attempting to walk the comments back, with a Romney adviser telling CNN, “He was tossing ideas out, not unveiling policy.”

For starters, Romney’s tax ideas, while reasonable, would raise nowhere near enough money to offset the huge tax cuts that he has in mind. Those tax cuts would increase the deficit by $900 billion in 2015 alone. Meanwhile, eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes, one of the largest tax expenditures for the government, for everyone saves $72 billion per year, and saves far less if the elimination is limited to upper-income Americans.

Romney’s plan to eliminate HUD, assuming he didn’t shuffle its programs to other departments, would bring an end to critical programs like Section 8 housing vouchers and community development block grants. Eliminating housing assistance is even more problematic given the disproportionate percentage of veterans in the homeless population.

So while he’s happy to hand out tax breaks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the very richest Americans, Romney would at least contemplate eliminating housing subsidies for the very lowest income Americans, giving them little hope of putting a roof over their heads.

With the housing crisis still plaguing America’s economic recovery and the Obama administration’s housing programs not doing much to help, Congressional Democrats and progressive groups have recently upped their calls for a broad mortgage relief program that reduces the amount struggling homeowners owe on their loans.

Thursday, those calls got a boost from International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde. Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Lagarde reiterated that mortgage relief was a “long-standing position” for the IMF, and that the U.S. should institute such a plan in order to return consumption and the appropriate level of indebtedness back to the American economy:

LAGARDE: This is something that the IMF has had a long-standing position of. The housing problem is something that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. And measures have been taken, there are proposals made by the administration. The big boys and girls, Fannie and Freddie, have to be a part of the equation. Because clearly, American households have to be able to unload a bit. Just in the way we’ve encouraged banks to lend, the households have to helped to borrow, so that consumption and appropriate indebtedness can be reinitiated. That’s our position.

The IMF has, indeed, had a long-standing position on mortgage relief for homeowners in the United States and around the world. In April 2011, it issued a report calling for mortgage relief, noting that American banks could withstand the losses principal reduction would bring about, despite their claims to the contrary. Lagarde called for mortgage relief in her initial speech as IMF head in August, and the IMF has made similar calls for struggling economies in Ireland and other countries, and recently issued another report calling for such a program in the United States.

Federal Housing Finance Agency head Edward DeMarco has thus far resisted calls for principal reduction, claiming that it “would protect big banks” at taxpayer expense, despite studies showing that it would save taxpayers money in the long-term. With progressive Democrats calling for DeMarco’s ouster and outside analysts criticizing his opposition to principal reduction, however, he has started to change his tune. Tuesday, DeMarco finally showed openness to principal reduction, and he is expected to make a decision on such a program sometime this month.

A California woman is facing foreclosure from Bank of America after taking out a loan to make her home more accessible for her disabled daughter, shining light on yet another improper foreclosure practice perpetuated by America’s largest banks.

Dirma Rodriguez fell behind on her original loan after spending thousands of dollars installing tile floors and a wheelchair ramp to make it easier for Ingrid Ortiz, her daughter who has cerebral palsy, to move around the house. When Rodriguez fell behind on her original loan, Bank of America offered her a trial modification. Even though Rodriguez kept up with those payments for more than a year, the bank sold her home at auction, and the new owner is pursuing eviction, the Los Angeles Times reports:

Rodriguez took out a loan to retrofit her house for her special-needs daughter. After she fell behind on her payments, the Bank of America lowered her monthly obligation, but then sold the house at a foreclosure auction last September. The new owner, a house flipper from El Segundo called West Ridge Rentals, moved to evict the family. [...]

Bank of America inherited Rodriguez’s loan from Countrywide. After her payment jumped, and she fell behind, the bank placed her in a trial loan modification. She made her payments faithfully for 13 months and was awaiting a permanent modification package when the bank sold her home out from under her, she says.

Rodriguez’s story, unfortunately, is not unique. Thanks to the process known as dual-tracking, banks have thrown thousands of homeowners into foreclosure even while offering those same homeowners loan modifications. As a result, homeowners who were willing to make new, lower payments to stay in their homes are often evicted anyway. Dual tracking, along discriminatory, fraudulent, and deceptive practices, led Bank of America and other Wall Street banks to settle a $25 billion suit with the federal government last month.

Trial modifications like the one given to Rodriguez, whose loan is backed by Freddie Mac, are supposed to last three months before the terms of the modification are made permanent if all payments are made. Rodriguez says she made 13 consecutive payments, but Bank of America told the Times that it still wants to be sure she can afford the payments before it makes the modification permanent. “I don’t want a free house,” Rodriguez told the Times. “I just want to make my payments.”

Luckily for Rodriguez, local activists have taken up her cause. Occupy Fights Foreclosure helped her stave off a scheduled eviction on March 26, and the company that bought her home at auction is willing to return it if Bank of America pays it back. The bank, which set the whole process in motion, is now considering giving her a modification that would allow her to keep the home.

Several of the nation’s biggest banks have gotten themselves into hot water for their inability to get homeowners into sustainable loan modifications. Bank of America, for instance, routinely lost homeowners’ paperwork, dragged the modification process out for months, and even foreclosed on one homeowner just days after approving him for a mortgage modification. And this was when the bank wasn’t intentionally denying homeowners federal mortgage aid.

Adding to the list of horrors, ProPublica found that Litton Loan Servicing, which was owned by Goldman Sachs at the time, denied many troubled homeowners mortgage modifications after sending their paperwork to India and losing it:

When homeowners faxed their documents, they didn’t go to Litton, [former employee Chris Wyatt] says. They went to India, where a low-cost company scanned and filed the documents — but often misfiled or lost them. Wyatt says Litton routinely denied modifications because homeowners had not sent their documents when, in fact, they had.

In a process internally referred to as a “denial sweep,” Litton’s computers would automatically generate denial letters for every homeowner who, according to Litton’s records, hadn’t sent their documents. But untold numbers of those documents had been lost on another continent. Wyatt complained about the practice in multiple meetings with senior management, he says, but managers were chiefly worried about reducing the overwhelming backlog.

Behavior of this sort is part of the reason that the Obama administration’s mortgage modification programs came up so woefully short of their goals. The programs depended far too much on providing incentives to the banks to modify mortgages, despite the shoddy state of those banks’ modification processes, and therefore only a fraction of the people at whom the programs were aimed actually received any help.