To help local policymakers address mortgage delinquency and foreclosure issues, the New York Fed is making important information on credit conditions available through its public website.

The Bank’s U.S. Credit Conditions site offers detailed data on mortgage foreclosures and delinquencies, bank credit card payments, and auto and student loans. The information, along with interactive maps, is designed to help government agencies, community groups, commercial institutions, and other practitioners better understand, monitor, and respond to local conditions associated with fore- closures and credit and mortgage delinquencies.

The site offers a range of informative features. For example, visitors can view, by county, overall credit conditions and compare a county’s ranking within its state or in the United States. Red and green “heat maps” illustrate whether conditions have worsened or improved over the past year. In addition, a sequence of charts shows the likelihood that subprime and alt-A mortgages will roll from their current status to thirty days late, from sixty to ninety days late, or from ninety days late to foreclosure. The roll rates are presented in terms of the number of mortgages likely to roll from one status to the next and in terms of dollar volumes.

The Federal Reserve considers the record rate of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures and its impact on communities to be an urgent problem. The goal of the U.S. Credit Conditions website is to enable a wide range of public and private sector decision makers to use this credit information to assist their efforts to resolve the delinquency and foreclosure problem and mitigate its impact.