CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien has put her downtown Manhattan loft up for sale for $4.6 million.

The former "American Morning" co-host says she's shopping for a home that's a shorter walk to school for her kids and is larger: "[I] had no idea I was having twins when we bought the place. Quite a surprise."

The 41-year-old anchor has four young children with her husband, Brad Raymond, an investment banker, and designed the roughly 4,000-square-foot co-operative apartment to be child-friendly. The seven-room, full-floor apartment, with a custom open kitchen, is in Chelsea and has a 42-foot-long living room, 11-foot-high ceilings and a double home office.

The home-mortgage industry takes advantage of consumers' confusion to charge some people much higher fees than others, according to a study prepared for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The study by Susan Woodward, a former chief economist for HUD, also found that loans arranged by brokers typically carried higher fees than those obtained directly from lenders.

The report, released Thursday, is based on an analysis of 7,560 fixed-rate home-purchase loans completed in May and June 2001 and insured by the Federal Housing Administration, an arm of HUD.

In every industry there's a push to be ecologically aware. Many deploy under-the-cover green techniques, such as using recycled raw materials. But some home furnishings designers are displaying their eco-awareness on the surface.

Catalogs and specialized retailers are selling goods ranging from a chair covered with recycled yarn to planters made from old tires. Many of these products have a modernist flair, compared to the frumpy green-oriented products of a decade ago such as beanbag chairs made of hemp.

Already burned by bad mortgages on their books, lenders now are feeling rising heat from loans they sold to investors.

Unhappy buyers of subprime mortgages, home-equity loans and other real-estate loans are trying to force banks and mortgage companies to repurchase a growing pile of troubled loans. The pressure is the result of provisions in many loan sales that require lenders to take back loans that default unusually fast or contained mistakes or fraud.

LAS VEGAS -- Sen. Barack Obama is hoping the housing mess can help sway the November election. The Democratic front-runner pitched his plans to stem the crisis during a visit on Tuesday to Nevada, the state with the highest rate of home foreclosures and a swing state that President Bush narrowly carried in 2000 and 2004.

Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. agreed to sell the Trump Marina Hotel Casino in Atlantic City to an affiliate of privately held Coastal Development LLC for $316 million.

Trump Chief Executive Mark Juliano said the debt-laden company is "closely evaluating" options, including additional development in Atlantic City, reducing debt and "potential projects to diversify our interests outside of Atlantic City."

The poshest room in the hotel -- the so-called presidential suite -- is getting its own upgrade.

Many hotels have long promoted their largest, most glamorous suite as the place to house moguls, celebrities and even actual presidents in the utmost comfort. Now, with competition in the U.S. hotel industry escalating as room supply continues to grow and demand slows, hotels are putting more glitz into their top suites. They hope to use the suites to woo not only those rich enough to afford their eye-popping prices -- $30,000 a night in some cases -- but also to generate buzz around their entire properties. The promise is that presidential-suite glamour may just rub off on those booking regular rooms.

It's said that hemlines fall with the economy. Ceilings may be following suit.

The cathedral-ceilinged "great room" -- a defining feature of big suburban houses for the past 15 years -- is losing favor. Owners say these double-height rooms are expensive to heat and cool. They can be drafty and reverberate noise. Cobwebs are hard to reach, painting requires long ladders and washing the second-story windows can be a nightmare. Moreover, growing numbers of home buyers think these soaring rooms waste space.

Home sales are rising in some U.S. metropolitan areas where lenders have slashed prices on foreclosed properties.

Generally, home sales remain weak. The National Association of Realtors reported last week that sales of previously occupied homes in April were down about 18% from the already depressed year-earlier level.

But sales are up sharply in some of the areas hit hardest by foreclosures and falling prices. They include: Las Vegas; Sacramento, Calif.; Fort Myers, Fla.; and inner-city Detroit.

Lennar Corp., one of the country's largest home builders, has been suffering for months from slow sales, plummeting prices and other pains from the worst housing crisis in decades. But none of this quite compares to the trials of San Francisco's land-use approval process.

Safety officials reported an increase in the average number of drowning deaths in pools and spas among children under the age of five, heightening concerns among consumer advocates about cheap, inflatable pools that often don't have the added safety measures of fences or alarms.

According to a new report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the average annual number of drowning deaths involving children younger than five in pools and spas has increased from 267 for 2002-2004 to 283 for 2003-2005. The majority of deaths and injuries occur in residential settings and involve children ages one to two, according to the commission.

Highlighting their desperation to sell houses, builders are bringing back the gimmicks -- mortgage rates that start low, help with down payments, zero out-of-pocket expenses -- that helped fuel the housing bubble before it went bust.

But this time, they say, history won't repeat itself.

Weary of bad news on the housing market, yet wary of missing a deal, readers continue to ask: Should I rent or buy?

There are powerful arguments for both cases. On the one hand, no one wants to buy something that's falling in value. On the other, foreclosures are creating one of the best buying opportunities in years, and rents are ticking up. REIS, a New York-based real estate research firm, expects rents will rise 3.8% this year, compared to a 3.1% gain last year.

WASHINGTON -- Existing-home sales fell a second month in a row during April, while inventories surged and prices dropped sharply from a year earlier.

Home resales fell to a 4.89 million annual rate, a 1.0% decrease from March's revised 4.94 million annual pace, the National Association of Realtors said Friday. Originally, the NAR estimated sales fell 2.0% to 4.93 million in March.

The median home price was $202,300 in April, down 8.0% from $219,900 in April 2007. The median price in March this year was $200,100. High inventories have exerted downward pressure on prices. The decline has kept would-be buyers from signing off on property as they wait for still-lower price tags.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Banking Committee seemed poised to act quickly to confirm Steven Preston, the White House's nominee to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Lawmakers said at a hearing that the agency needed leadership immediately.

Democrats and Republicans praised Mr. Preston, saying they were impressed by his management of the Small Business Administration. They said someone needed to restore confidence and morale at HUD, which handles one of the Bush administration's top efforts to address the housing turmoil.

Country-music superstar Kenny Rogers, planning to live full time on a ranch he's building, has put his Atlanta mansion on the market for $7.9 million.

Kenny Rogers has put his Atlanta mansion on the market for $7.9 million.

San Francisco

This city's decade-long real-estate boom is fizzling out, but it has left an important legacy: When the next big earthquake hits, San Francisco will be a much safer place than it was after the last major shake.

The lesson: Stringent government quake-safety regulations are crucial. But there is nothing like several waves of economic prosperity for these rules to translate into cities that are more likely to better withstand quakes of magnitude of the one in China last week.

Home prices are falling faster as the economy slows and turmoil in the mortgage markets continues.

Prices fell an average of 1.7% nationwide in the first quarter from the final three months of 2007, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. The decline was the largest in the index's 17-year history. The government index, which is seasonally adjusted and based on data for home purchases, had dropped 1.4% in the prior quarter. Compared with a year earlier, home prices dropped 3.1% in the first quarter.

Downtown: It's been among the safest places to hide from the housing downturn.

Much has been made of the way the nation's real-estate bust is affecting some American cities far more than others. But even within a single metro area, changes in housing prices can show wild variations.

And in big cities, prices in the central cores often fare the best. Far-flung suburbs -- where home building exploded in recent years -- have more typically gotten hammered. In between is a patchwork of established suburbs and city neighborhoods peripheral to downtown that can be all over the map in terms of price declines -- or even increases.

Merrill Lynch & Co. is in renewed talks to move its headquarters to a planned skyscraper at the World Trade Center site, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move would be a major boost to the massive development at the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While work is under way on a wide range of projects, few private-sector tenants have expressed serious interest in leasing space at the site.

The land deal that tripped up the nation's largest pension fund also is proving to be a rare misstep for MacFarlane Partners, a real-estate investment firm known for pioneering urban development.

PROPERTY REPORT 

Even as much of the country struggles with the housing bust and a weak economy, states that produce oil, gas and other commodities are enjoying a boom and ramping up spending on things from wind farms to education.

A joint venture between New York developer Related Cos. and investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. signed a $1 billion deal to acquire the largest undeveloped parcel of land in Manhattan, the latest move in one of New York's longest-running real-estate chess games.

Some of the city's biggest-name developers have lusted for years after the 26-acre Hudson Yards site atop an active rail yard on Manhattan's far West Side.

In a deal announced Monday, the venture agreed in principle to pay $1 billion to New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the property's owner, for a 99-year lease, officials said. It plans to construct 13 buildings on the site, including offices, apartments, hotels, shops and parking space. The building space would total 12 million square feet, one million more than is planned for the rebuilt World Trade Center.

Fannie Mae is expected to announce Friday that it is scrapping a policy requiring higher down payments on home mortgages in areas where house prices are falling.

The change comes in response to protests from vital political allies of the government-sponsored provider of funding for mortgages, including the National Association of Realtors, the National Association of Home Builders and organizations that promote affordable housing for low-income people.

Consumer sentiment about the economy dropped to a 28-year low amid surging gasoline prices, falling home prices and a weakening job market.

Meanwhile, housing starts made an unexpected rebound in April, reflecting gains in the volatile multifamily segment for apartments and townhomes. But starts for single-family homes fell, and analysts predict continued turmoil in the housing sector.

REAL TIME ECONOMICS 

Pleasant Rowland, the founder of doll company American Girl who spent six years and millions of dollars restoring much of Aurora, N.Y., has put both of her houses there on the market.

Robert Maguire III, developer of many of the skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles, has abandoned his last-ditch effort to buy the company that he founded and has been forced out as chief executive and chairman, according to people familiar with the matter.

A growing number of cities and counties grappling with water shortages are turning to a solution that may be tough for some homeowners to stomach: purifying wastewater so that residents can drink it.

In an effort to replenish its groundwater supply, Los Angeles is slated to announce Thursday a plan that will recycle 4.9 billion gallons of treated wastewater to drinking standards by 2019. In San Diego, the city council voted in favor of a pilot project that would pump recycled sewage water into a drinking-water reservoir, despite a veto from the mayor over the system's cost. Miami-Dade County, Fla., is planning a system that would pump 23 million gallons a day of purified wastewater into the ground; the water will eventually travel to a supply well and be reclaimed for drinking use.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are "a point of vulnerability for the financial system" because their capital is meager in relation to their mortgage assets and obligations, the companies' main regulator said.

HONG KONG -- A family feud roiling one of the world's largest property developers took a fresh turn Thursday when the company's chairman and chief executive won a temporary injunction fending off what he called an attempt by his two younger brothers to oust him.

Walter Kwok, the embattled head of Hong Kong-listed Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd., has been on a three-month leave since a dispute erupted with his brothers Thomas and Raymond, both vice chairmen and managing directors. The dispute, which is only now being spun out in public view, casts a pall over the company's vaunted name.

WASHINGTON -- In the national debate about a housing rescue, there is a surprising wild card: the lame-duck White House.

For weeks, lawmakers say, the administration has sent conflicting signals about what kind of bill it would approve, vacillating between veto threats and suggestions of flexibility.

•  The Issue: Lawmakers say the White House has sent mixed signals about what kind of housing bill it would approve.•  The Latest: Top Senate lawmakers Thursday reached an agreement in principle on a bill.•  The Background: The House passed its version of the legislation last week despite the administration's veto threat.

Real estate in Calgary, a gateway city to one of the world's largest petroleum troves in Canada's Alberta Province, has been on a tear in recent years.

Nine office buildings are under construction in the downtown including the 58-story BOW tower, slated to be natural-gas giant EnCana Corp's new headquarters and Canada's tallest building outside Toronto when completed in 2011. Demand from new workers streaming into the region nearly doubled median home prices since 2004. And even as the credit crunch has delayed projects elsewhere, developers are moving ahead with the three billion Canadian dollar, or US$2.98 billion, StoneGate Landing project.

Wall Street's belief that the self-storage business is recession-resistant is being tested.

These miniwarehouses have sprouted throughout the country like roadside motels, becoming archives of middle-class prosperity and mobility as well as retrenchment in tough economic times. The four publicly traded self-storage stocks recorded a total return, including dividends, of nearly 24% this year through April, outperforming all other real-estate investment trust groups, according to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, a trade association.

Beazer Homes USA Inc. restated financial results over nine years, removing one of several clouds hanging over the home builder.

After a nearly yearlong internal review that delayed the company's quarterly filings and resulted in a showdown with bondholders, Beazer late Monday restated its earnings for fiscal years 1998 to 2006. The Atlanta company said its audit committee determined it had improperly recorded certain liabilities associated with land development and other costs, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Based partly on the probe's findings, management concluded there were "material weaknesses" in Beazer's internal controls over financial reporting, according to the filings.

Here's another consequence of the troubled housing market: Some homeowners associations are running low on cash.

The association at Monaco Place, a community of single-family homes and condominiums in Denver, is short $250,000 of its $9.3 million annual operating budget. It can't pay for needed roof and siding repairs to homes. Potholes in the streets haven't been filled in order to save money to keep electricity running in common areas, says Dee Tyler, CEO of Colorado Association Services, which manages the association. Monaco Place was already suffering from a high rate of foreclosures before the credit crunch hit. In the past three years, about a third of its 193 units have been foreclosed on.

Centro Properties Group used a complicated and often-opaque capital structure to grow into one of the world's largest and most debt-laden shopping-center owners.

But now that Centro is in hot water with its lenders, that structure is serving a new purpose: It has become one of the factors deterring creditors from liquidating the company, based in Melbourne, Australia, that owns interests in roughly 670 shopping centers in the U.S. and 130 in Australia.

WASHINGTON -- The House passed a giant package of measures designed to tackle the housing crisis Thursday, but only after two days of bickering that signal turbulence ahead for the legislation.

Democrats and Republicans, abandoning the brief comity that helped them forge an economic-stimulus package earlier this year, argued over the procedures used to bring the bill to a vote. Another flash point was the millions in spending directed toward community groups Republicans said would fund Democrats' get-out-the-vote efforts.

One of the most zealous commercial real-estate lenders during the industry's boom is losing its most aggressive deal maker.

Robert Verrone, known by the nickname "Large Loan" because of his hard-charging personality and proclivity for $50 million-plus mortgages at attractive terms, is expected to leave Wachovia Corp. within the next week, according to people familiar with the matter.

Democrats may be risking a backlash at the polls in November by pushing hard to use taxpayer money to rescue homeowners who can no longer afford their mortgages in the face of stiff resistance from President Bush and many other Republicans.

The Democrats in Congress and the party's presidential candidates frame the issue as doing at least as much for beleaguered homeowners as the government is doing for Wall Street. The White house and most House Republicans counter this amounts to using taxpayer money to reward bad behavior.

A major provision of the housing-market legislation passed by the House Thursday is getting a lukewarm reception from the mortgage industry.

The measure, which is aimed at reducing foreclosures, would encourage mortgage companies to reduce the principal on troubled loans. In exchange, the Federal Housing Administration would pay off the current loan and issue the borrower a new FHA-backed mortgage. Struggling homeowners would get lower monthly payments to increase chances they could avoid foreclosure.

Expected mortgage losses at Wachovia Corp. and Washington Mutual Inc. might not look as steep as those at rival lenders.

The reason: In recent weeks, Wachovia and WaMu have cited housing data from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight when detailing their exposure to the U.S. housing market. A different index relied on by other banks, the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, is gloomier.

•  The News: Wachovia and Washington Mutual are using housing-market data that might be less-negative than those used by other lenders.•  Contrast: The less-negative data are from Ofheo; the gloomier, from S&P/Case-Shiller.•  The Banks Say: WaMu says everything's disclosed publicly. Wachovia says Ofheo's data more closely resemble the bank's book of mortgages.

Maybe there's a way to thrive in the howling wasteland that is the home-loan market. Bonds backed by mortgages look like a buying opportunity, assuming a new spate of defaults doesn't send their prices tumbling again.

Already, these mortgage-backed securities, or MBS, are showing signs that the market thinks the bad times may be ending. At their worst in mid-March, MBS yields were pumped up to 1.89 percentage points more than ultrasafe Treasurys, according to Merrill Lynch research. Lately, that spread has narrowed to 0.97 point. Historically, the gap is only around 0.3.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo may face legal challenges to his effort to overhaul the way homes are appraised across the U.S. Such a case could help clarify how far state officials can go in setting public policy for the nation as a whole.

Earlier this year, Mr. Cuomo made an end run around federal regulators and Congress with a campaign against inflated home appraisals, which have contributed to the current wave of mortgage defaults. He threatened to sue government-sponsored mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for allegedly failing to ensure that appraisers were shielded from pressure to pad their estimates. Appraisers have long maintained that many loan officers or brokers, whose pay depends on how many loans they complete, pressure them to come up with value estimates high enough to ensure approval of the loans.

Q: Where can I find a real estate agent who focuses on selling U.S. properties -- specifically condos around Millennium Park in Chicago -- to foreign buyers?

--Ellis Levin, Chicago

A: Good news in a bad economy: Selling real estate is still one job that can't be outsourced overseas. That means you'll have to rely on local talent -- and not foreign real estate agents -- to reach buyers overseas.

Your instinct to look overseas is a good one, for several reasons:

Fannie Mae is preparing to introduce by midyear a program of refinancing mortgages for people who owe more than the current value of their homes, a situation known as being "underwater."

The plan is the latest twist in efforts to contain the surge in foreclosures on homes in much of the U.S. It differs from a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday that would authorize the Federal Housing Administration to insure loans for distressed borrowers only after the lender has written down the principal -- something many lenders are reluctant to do. Fannie's refinance plan would result in new loans of equivalent size, leaving the borrower underwater but giving him or her a lower monthly payment or at least a fixed rate.

See more data on housing inventory

The supply of homes available for sale in major metropolitan areas edged higher in April, new data show.

Total listings of homes in 29 metro areas at the end of April increased 1.3% from a month earlier, according to figures compiled by ZipRealty Inc., a real-estate-brokerage firm based in Emeryville, Calif. The data cover all listings of single-family homes, condos and town houses on local multiple-listing services in those 29 areas, where Zip operates.

WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department, in an effort to make its main program for helping home borrowers hit by the subprime mess more effective, plans to step up pressure on mortgage companies.

Officials have called a six-hour meeting Tuesday with banking officials to discuss adopting a uniform, but voluntary, set of criteria to speed the time it takes qualified borrowers to modify mortgages they can't afford. Officials also want to make the modification process more consistent across institutions.

A bankruptcy judge has rejected Countrywide Financial Corp.'s proposal to settle accusations that it fabricated evidence used in a bid to foreclose on a home, saying he wants to know more about the alleged false documents.

Judge Thomas Agresti of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Pittsburgh on Tuesday dismissed the company's request to settle a dispute with Sharon Diane Hill, a Pittsburgh-area woman who was threatened with foreclosure by the country's largest home lender.

WASHINGTON -- Edward Bedenbaugh III was about to start a job as a youth-violence counselor working in inner-city schools, mediating disputes before they escalated into lethal exchanges. He was celebrating his appointment at a nightspot in an upscale part of the nation's capital when he was shot in the back five times. The 29-year-old man died the next morning, April 17, two days before his oldest daughter's 10th birthday.

He was one of 14 people, all African-Americans, to die in a 13-day spasm of violence. That surge was enough to help make this April, with 18 murders, 20% deadlier than April 2007.

In a blow to an already wobbly U.S. economy, banks are imposing tougher lending terms for consumers and businesses across the board.

The Federal Reserve's survey of banks' senior loan officers, one of the most closely watched gauges of lending practices, found that the credit crunch is widening. The proportion of domestic banks tightening their standards was at or near historical highs for almost all loan categories, including credit cards and student loans.

As the growth in subprime mortgage delinquencies appears to be slowing, lenders are seeing a rapid rise in defaults on a type of mortgage that gives consumers with good credit several different monthly-payment options.

These mortgages, which are sometimes known as "pick-a-pay" or payment-option mortgages but are generically called option adjustable-rate mortgages, are turning out, in some cases, to be even more caustic than subprime loans, in part because the loan balance and the monthly payments on some loans is growing even as home prices are falling.

Struggling U.S. homeowners could receive federal loans to pay down as much as 20% of their principal under a proposal introduced Wednesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to help stem foreclosures.

The plan would be run through the Treasury Department, which would make the loans.

The program would hinge on the willingness of mortgage servicers and investors to agree to restructure troubled loans, as well as to pay the financing cost of making the federal loans.