The cities that are showing signs of stabilization and those that continue to unravel.

Wishing you'd left the game earlier is a time-honored Las Vegas tradition. Today, that's true not only for gamblers but for homeowners there. The last time Las Vegas properties were worth more than the average mortgage? August 2003.

Blame overbuilding and risky loans, a gambling mentality or even the desert sun, but based on Thursday's results from the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, which measures metro home prices in 20 cities through December 2008, Las Vegas is the weakest market in the country. Prices are dropping quickly (down 4.81% since last month and 33% in the last year), the pace of decline is accelerating at the third-fastest rate in the nation, and based on lost equity, homeowners are out 65 months of mortgage payments.

All signals that things aren't likely getting better any time soon.

"Vegas is a market unto its own," says Steve Cesinger, chief financial officer at Dewberry Capital, an Atlanta-based real estate investment firm. "I don't know what those guys were drinking when they thought all this building made sense. If it does work out soon, then there's some force out there in the universe that I'm not aware of."

The S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, released monthly, examines repeat home sales in 20 metro markets, including the city core and surrounding suburbs. This means that while prices in tony San Francisco neighborhood Pacific Heights might be holding up, the net effect of including a bankrupt suburb like Vallejo brings down the metro area's score. Each city's score is assigned based on the price difference from 2000, which is scored as 100. So San Francisco's score of 130.12 means prices are up 30.12% from 2000. It still has the potential for a further fall, given the 31% year-over-year drop.

Forbes also analyzed monthly declines and year-over-year declines in home prices to determine where prices were falling fastest and where those drops were picking up momentum. It's not a good thing for San Diego that prices from November 2008 to December 2008 fell 2.13%, but as prices declined by 2.29% from October to November, and 2.44% from September to October, the speed with which prices are falling is slowing.

That slowing rate of decline, also seen in places such as Denver, Washington, D.C., and Boston, helped rank those cities as some of the stronger markets in the country.

Contrast that with Minneapolis, where prices fell just 0.96% from September to October, but by December, the rate of month-to-month declines had jumped to 4.6%, an unwelcome acceleration.

Next, to rule out places in complete depression, we looked at how many months of equity homeowners have lost. Places like Detroit (-2.98%) and Cleveland (-2.07%) haven't declined as quickly over the last month as Seattle (-3.63%) or Charlotte (-2.55%), but that's because prices in those two Rust Belt cities are so depressed it's difficult for them to fall any further. Detroit and Cleveland homeowners have lost 141 and 92 months of equity, respectively, whereas Seattle and Charlotte prices have only declined for the last 39 and 33 months, respectively.

One other factor to consider with the Case-Shiller numbers is that the index tracks repeat home sales. That means cities like Tampa and Miami, which are notorious for overbuilt new inventory and high numbers of foreclosures, perform better on the index than they ought to, as those two factors are not tracked.

"Case-Shiller doesn't take into account new construction or foreclosure sales," says Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a Manhattan residential appraisal firm. "In some of these markets, I'm not sure how you can ignore new construction or foreclosures."

Another city with foreclosure and new construction problems is Phoenix, where bad loans have mounted and mortgage delinquencies, a forebearer of foreclosures, have risen.

"It's pretty gruesome," says Anthony Sanders, a finance professor at Arizona State University. He points to delinquencies as a major problem and a sign that the Valley of the Sun won't be bouncing back any time soon. In Phoenix, seriously delinquent loans--those that haven't been paid in 90 days--have increased from 3.5% to 27.3% for subprime loans since this time in 2005. Adjustable-rate mortgages that are seriously delinquent have gone from less than 1% to 20.2% in the same period.

With those problems looming on the horizon in many cities across the country, Obama might need more ammunition than his proposed $75 billion foreclosure prevention package offers.

Then again, even in a boom-bust capital like Los Angeles, if you bought in 2000, paid your mortgage on time and are still in your home, you've seen a 71.5% price appreciation. There's something to be said for that kind of responsible, long-term investor.

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats on Monday advanced the $838 billion economic stimulus bill, clearing a major procedural hurdle by a razor thin margin with the help of just three Republicans. A vote on final passage of the bill is expected on Tuesday.

The Senate vote, by 61 to 36, to close debate on the stimulus, symbolized the partisanship that still grips Congress despite President Obama’s call for new cooperation. It also highlighted the rising power of the centrist Republicans who cast the critical votes. Under Senate rules, it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture and usher a bill to a vote.

Those votes, by Senators Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, along with the 56 Democrats and two Independents who regularly vote with them, followed a succession of floor speeches by Republicans criticizing the stimulus as a bloated, wasteful spending bill.

But supporters of the measure said that a good, bipartisan effort had been made at drafting a compromise bill.

“I am proud of the bipartisan work that we have done during the last 10 days,” said Ms. Collins, who supplied one of the three crucial Republican votes. “As with any major legislation, this bill is not perfect, but it can go a long way toward creating jobs and addressing the dire economic crisis facing our nation.”

The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said: “The United States senators from both parties met the seriousness of the economic crisis with an earnest approach to solving this emergency.”

With Mr. Obama in Indiana Monday afternoon to kick off a heightened effort to sell the stimulus plan to the public, Senate Democrats responded with their own speeches describing the bill as desperately needed to create millions of jobs and halt the recession. But for all the recriminations, it was unclear if Congress, in reconciling the Senate and House version of the bill this week, would take steps to ensure that it provides the quickest, most effective lift for the economy, or if lawmakers would simply take the path of least political resistance in rushing to get the bill to the White House by Monday.

Senate Republicans leveled their grievances amid an outcry by some House Democrats and governors and mayors from around the country, who accused Senate Democrats of caving to Republican demands by reducing the aid to states in the bill.

If the Senate approves the measure, as expected, negotiations to resolve differences with the $820 billion bill passed by the House are expected to focus in part on the Senate’s decision to cut $40 billion from a state stabilization fund.

That money, while not providing a direct lift to the economy, would reduce pressure on states for layoffs and service cuts that economists say would undercut the efforts by the stimulus bill to create jobs and spur consumer spending and business investments.

As it stands now, the Senate bill focuses more on tax cuts, while the House bill provides more aid to state and local governments. The Senate bill does not include $19 billion for school construction included in the House bill, reduces health insurance subsidies for the unemployed, and scales back Mr. Obama’s proposed middle class tax cut.

The Senate bill also includes nearly $70 billion to prevent millions of middle class families in 2009 from having to pay the alternative minimum tax, originally designed to impose minimum tax payments by the wealthy. Because Congress has made such an adjustment for years now, economists say the provision offers no new help to the economy.

Just as the Senate was voting, the Congressional Budget Office released a new analysis showing the total cost of the Senate version of the stimulus bill to be $838.2 billion over 10 years, of which $292.5 billion or roughly 35 percent is in the form of tax cuts.

The cost of the bill fluctuated slightly throughout the weekend, as Senate Democrats finalized the legislative language to reflect their deal late Friday night with the three Republicans.

After a week of the most open floor debate since Democrats won control of the Senate in 2006, the Republicans complained that they had still been largely shut out of developing the huge package of spending programs and tax cuts to revive the economy.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, for instance, said that he and other Republicans had been prevented from offering amendments, including one that would place restrictions on an increased in federal aid to states for rising Medicaid costs.

“I’m not convinced the majority wanted to have open debate and take votes on many of these amendments including mine,” he said. “It’s too bad because this bill still can be made a bipartisan bill and this bill can still be made a more effective states.”

Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, complained that for all the spending in the bill, it does not provide a sufficient number of public works projects. ,

“If we’re going to spend all this money, let’s at least get something for it, provide some jobs and get some roads and highways and bridges, things this country really needs,” he said.

“This is the largest spending in the history of mankind, the largest spending in the history of the world,” Mr. Inhofe added. “It’s something that we should not let happen, but it is going to happen right down party line.”

The Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he appreciated the more open floor debate but that it had not led to a bill that he could support. “Just because we get amendments doesn’t necessarily mean we will win them,” he said at a news conference.

“This package, had it been developed in genuine consultation, could have had a different result,” Mr. McConnell said. “But at the end of the day, it was — the administration decided — let the package be developed in Congress by the majority, and old habits die hard. You know, there was no meaningful consultation in the early part of the process. So if you don’t have that on the takeoff, you don’t end up having it on the landing.”

MORTGAGE rates have dipped to their lowest levels in decades, but getting a mortgage in New York City these days often has less to do with buyers’ finances and more to do with circumstances beyond their control.

Your Money Guides

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

‘TORTUROUS’ Norman Calvo, the president of Universal Mortgage, says banks are now requiring documentation from buildings as well as home buyers.

Even if a prospective buyer has impeccable credit and reliable income, many banks are refusing to make loans if they don’t like what they find when they review the finances and bylaws of the building where the purchaser hopes to live.

Among the matters under scrutiny: the dollar amount and type of insurance a building has; the size of the building; the size of the apartment; and, in the case of new developments, the number of apartments sold and closed.

Mortgage brokers, real estate lawyers and agents say that the roadblocks some banks have thrown up seem almost arbitrary. “Banks are asking questions that I’ve never heard anybody ask before,” said Roberta Axelrod, the director of residential sales and rentals at Time Equities, a real estate developer and landlord. “They’re looking in much more detail into specific aspects of the buildings.”

Mortgage brokers say that bank requirements seem to change week to week and vary greatly from bank to bank. Many of the banks are responding to directives from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored agencies that resell packages of loans to investors. Most of the requirements have been on the agencies’ books for years, but the credit crisis has prompted them to adhere to them much more rigorously than in the years when the real estate market was booming.

“It’s gotten torturous,” said Norman Calvo, the president of Universal Mortgage, a broker with offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. “It’s still possible to get a mortgage, but the documentation required now is monumental because the questionnaires and insurance documents needed have to come not just from the purchaser but from the building, too.”

Mr. Calvo said he recently spent hours on the phone on behalf of a prospective buyer in an eight-unit building in Brooklyn, pleading with a major bank to ease off on its demand that the building be insured for a replacement cost of up to $2 million in the event of a boiler explosion.

“The whole building was only worth $796,000 and the boiler only cost $5,000 to replace, so the insurance company told us it was impossible to get that kind of replacement coverage,” he said. “But the bank wouldn’t budge.”

Smaller regional banks tend to be more forgiving because they are more familiar with the local market, mortgage brokers said, but they often cannot provide deals as attractive as those offered by larger national lending institutions.

While mortgage brokers can help buyers wade through the guidelines, buyers may be better off in some cases going directly to banks. Many large banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America, are for the most part no longer offering loans through mortgage brokers, preferring to have borrowers work directly with their own loan officers.

Banks of all sizes are now carefully reviewing the insurance policies that co-ops and condominiums hold, specifically to see whether a building has fidelity bonding, which is insurance against theft by property managers or by the building’s board of directors; whether its insurance has an A rating; and, if a building is in a flood zone, whether it has adequate protection.

The standards set by banks often put smaller buildings at a disadvantage. Many of them, for example, do not have fidelity bonding or may have insurance rated A-minus or even lower. (The ratings refer to an insurer’s ability to meet its obligations to policyholders.)

Avi Fisher, who recently sold his co-op in downtown Brooklyn, said he went through a few weeks of nail-biting uncertainty when his buyers informed him that their bank would not close on their mortgage because the 20-unit building had insurance rated only A-minus. “I talked to our property manager and he said this was going to cause a wave of problems all over New York because most buildings have A-minus insurance,” he said.

The buyers went searching for a bank that would make the loan despite the insurance rating and eventually found one, Mr. Fisher said. “I think they wound up going to the bank that owns the underlying mortgage on the building itself, so it worked out,” he said.

In neighborhoods like Battery Park City, which is in a flood zone, banks are now demanding very high levels of flood insurance.

Luigi Rosabianca, the principal of Rosabianca & Associates, a real estate law firm that does much of its business in Battery Park City, said that as a result, many buyers are finding that they have to add flood insurance to their homeowners’ insurance even if they’re buying an apartment on a high floor.

“The banks are concerned about buildings’ not having enough insurance for full replacement if there is a flood,” he said. “In the past, you always hada difficult bank now and then, but you didn’t have all the banks being difficult.”

Depending on how much coverage a bank requires, the additional insurance might cost a one-bedroom buyer about $2,000 to $2,500 more a year, according to Mr. Rosabianca.

Buyers in smaller buildings are also finding it very difficult to get loans or to refinance their mortgages. “If you have a co-op of less than five units, nobody wants to touch it,” said Mr. Calvo, whose Brooklyn office works with many brownstones of four units or fewer. He said some banks would agree to refinance a mortgage if they already held the mortgage.

For new loans, he said, his office has to do much more research to make a deal happen. Because most banks will agree to do only one loan in such a small building, his loan officers have to get mortgage information from every other homeowner in the building and then find a lender that has no loans there but is willing to work with a small building.

Banks unfamiliar with the New York City market often set guidelines that don’t apply. Ms. Axelrod of Time Equities said she had seen banks reject loan applications because they didn’t want to give mortgages to people in walk-ups, to apartments under 500 square feet or to buildings that don’t have parking.

“They think walk-ups are substandard housing, and they don’t realize that 500 square feet is actually a nice-sized studio in Manhattan,” she said. “And as far as parking — well, hello — we have to explain to them that most existing construction in the city doesn’t have parking and people are perfectly willing to buy in these buildings.”

In fact, many of the guidelines are designed to deal with problems that have arisen in the national marketplace, problems that the city has managed to avoid, said Melissa Cohn, the president of Manhattan Mortgage. “New York City is a big exception,” she said, “and the fact that we’re put under a national umbrella is certainly hurting our marketplace.”

For new construction, some banks will now make loans only if the building is at least 70 percent sold or 51 percent occupied. These standards make it very difficult for developments that are being sold before construction is finished. Ms. Cohn said some banks were willing to give waivers, but “a lot of the buildings that are still under construction are going to have trouble.”

Shaun Osher, the chief executive of Core Group Marketing, which represents many new developments, estimated that 90 percent of the dozens of projects that were being considered but not started have probably been shelved and that many of developments in mid-construction have also been put on hold.

“The developers can’t get construction loans because the buyers can’t get mortgages,” he said. “Everything is connected.”

As a result, many developers are looking for ways to self-finance by offering mortgages directly to prospective buyers.

Ms. Cohn held out some limited hope. “Everything changes on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “But I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

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