Down payment assistance bites the dust

"The recent housing bill may have slammed the door on working families, but we are heartened that Congress has begun to take steps to re-open it," AmeriDream president Ann Ashburn said in a statement in support of the bill.

Nor has Nehemiah given up on reinstatement of the seller-funded down payment assistance model, Syphax says. Yet even he hints that perhaps these programs shouldn't be brought back in exactly the same format as they previously existed. He says the programs were "tremendously effective," but "could and needed to be improved."

"We will be fighting to bring back the program as we always thought it should have been and that we have been asking HUD for over a decade to help us create, which is a program with higher standards, more services provided to homebuyers and one where there is effective data capture, so we can continue to learn how to improve the program even further," he says. "That’s what we're fighting for."