The mortgage industry is in an uproar over a proposal that would require banks to participate in professional mediation before foreclosing on St. Louis County homeowners.

Bankers predict big problems if the St. Louis County Council approves the measure, which they say would burden lenders, discourage mortgage lending and drive up interest rates.

“You would have to do something entirely different when servicing properties in St. Louis County. If every municipality tried to impose their own guidelines, imagine the havoc,” said Keith Thornburg, general counsel of the Missouri Bankers Association.“It’s very chilling for home buyers trying to get a loan.”

Baloney, say mediation advocates.

“I don’t see any data anywhere in the country that supports that,” said Karen Tokarz, a law professor who studies mediation at Washington University.

Indeed, such mediation is required with foreclosures in parts of more than 20 states, including Illinois, without reports of problems. And a local mediation program, right across the river in Madison County, has been running without major issue since June of last year, supporters say.

Mediation seeks to offer a last chance for a homeowner to stave off foreclosure, which advocates say benefits both borrower and lender.

Still, it remains unclear how many of St. Louis County’s homeowners facing foreclosure might participate or benefit from the proposal. Under the proposed plan, homeowners facing foreclosure could opt for a mediator – with the bank paying the bill. A professional would try to work out a compromise – most often a payment reduction – to keep the borrower at home.

Banks wouldn’t have to agree to a deal. They could still foreclose. But they’d face a $1,000 fine if they refuse to mediate or if the mediator felt they acted in bad faith.

In Madison County, the program has put a small dent in foreclosures. Linda Jun, who ran the program until last week, said only 10 to 20 percent of borrowers opt for mediation, although it’s offered to everyone in foreclosure.

Of the 291 who signed up, 61 homeowners reached a deal with their creditors so far, according to court figures. Of those, all but two kept their homes. About 100 cases are still working through the system, so the number of averted foreclosures could increase.

Madison County’s experience seems on par with other mediation programs around the country.

The St. Louis County Council passed its own mediation plan by 5-to-2 on a preliminary test vote on Aug. 14; a final vote is expected on Tuesday. But bankers are mobilizing and threatening lawsuits if it wins final approval.

The bill was introduced by Councilwoman Hazel Erby, a Democrat who represents some inner-ring suburbs where foreclosure rates are high. As of July, 805 homes in St. Louis County were in some phase of foreclosure, according to figures from RealtyTrac.

As our region prepares for the possibility of a hurricane impact, it seems so long ago that Hurricane Charley ravaged Charlotte County. But to those who lived through it, I am sure the bad memories are flooding back.

And for all of us, windstorm insurance is once again brought to mind, along with checking batteries in flashlights and stocking up on food that does not require cooking.

It is all part of living here, as illustrated by a reader’s response to my July 14 column, about Florida home builders rallying in Tampa in support of housing by urging preservation of the home mortgage-interest tax deduction and less stringent lending standards:

“While eliminating the mortgage-interest deduction is definitely a bad move, the second blow in the 1-2 punch definitely will be the increased insurance rates if Citizens bows to Gov. Scott’s desire to raise rates.

“Just when housing is showing a good recovery, this stands to derail the process. For any monthly PITI (principal, interest, taxes and insurance) payment, the same payment will be able to contain much less principal/interest to accommodate the much-higher insurance rates. This will result in significantly less purchasing power.

“I do not understand bolstering the cost of insurance if few can afford it. Things are tough enough. This should be a front-burner issue, along with the mortgage-interest deduction.”

When South Florida’s housing bubble burst and home prices plummeted, they never fell far enough to make rents or single-family homes affordable for the average family.

The median home price in Broward County last year was still $47,611 more than the median household could afford, according to an assessment performed by Florida International University’s Metropolitan Center. The gap was $47,263 in Palm Beach County and $60,243 in Miami-Dade County, the report said.

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More than half the renters in Broward County – 107,107 in 2010 – are “extremely cost-burdened,” spending more than half their income on rent, the report showed.

“For people that are lower-income, even with low interest rates and low payments, they still can’t come up with the down payments that are now required,” said Ralph Stone, director of Broward County‘s Housing Finance and Community Development Division. “The foreclosure inventory is not making any kind of dent in the affordable rent housing.”

South Florida efforts to require new residential developments to include affordable or workforce housing haven’t paid off yet.

Palm Beach and Broward counties both passed rules in 2006, and each has received commitments for more than 1,500 affordable houses, condos or apartments. So far, none of the homes has been built in either county, although Palm Beach County has 168 of the reduced-rent apartments on the market or under construction.

Coral Springs, Boynton Beach and Davie, three cities that created their own workforce housing requirements before the stock market collapse in 2008, have each temporarily suspended their programs in the past year. Coral Springs and Boynton Beach have had no projects come through since passing their ordinances in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and Davie officials complained the regulation was stifling development.

Despite those setbacks, Fort Lauderdale is considering making its own affordable housing requirements — six years after former Mayor Jim Naugle said a similar plan reeked of communism.

The city’s Affordable Housing Advisory Committee says the affordability gap will continue to widen as the housing market rebounds.

“I think Fort Lauderdale is a different community than Coral Springs and Davie. It’s the urban center of Broward County. There’s a greater need,” developer and committee member Peter Henn said.

“When people’s kids can’t come back to Fort Lauderdale because they can’t afford to live here, that’s when [people] realize there’s a problem,” Henn said.

The committee last week presented commissioners with a recommendation that the city require residential developments with at least 10 units to have 10 percent of the units set aside for affordable housing, or for the developer to pay $100,000 into a trust fund for each required affordable housing unit.

Industry representative worry about the impact of such regulations.

“Something like this would dramatically discourage construction, especially rental apartments,” developer Jack Loos said.

Developer Dev Motwani said it wouldn’t be hard for developers of luxury homes and condos to write a check, but it would be for less-upscale projects.

“What this will do is end a lot of development in the middle market,” Motwani said.

Committee members said the city could offer increased density, reduced parking or other measures as incentives to offset the cost to developers.

Harvesting rainwater to use for growing vegetables makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, the most common method of rainwater harvesting isn’t the most effective. Typically, gardeners invest in a rain barrel — which holds only 50 or 60 gallons of water — and then dole out the captured water to plants as needed, hopefully emptying the barrel before the next storm.

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But 50 gallons is only a small fraction of the water you could be harvesting each time it rains. During a 1-inch shower, more than 900 gallons of water flow off the roof of a 30-by-50-foot house or barn. Instead of catching just a little bit of it in a rain barrel, why not capture it all? You can do just that with a simple setup that diverts rain from your downspouts directly to your garden. We’ll tell you more about how to do this in a minute, but first, we’ll explain why we think it’s such a good idea.

How Soil Stores Water

Even many experienced gardeners have trouble comprehending just how much water soil can hold. Except in areas with consistently high rainfall, your garden soil’s moisture level will seldom be at “field capacity.” That’s the term scientists use to describe the maximum amount of water a soil can hold. When it rains or when we irrigate, gravity pulls the water down into the soil. After a heavy rain, some of the water may move all the way down to the water table or the bedrock, but a large amount of it is held by capillary forces that cause water to coat each soil particle and partially fill the spaces between particles. (An example of capillary action is the way a paper towel absorbs liquid.) That capillary water is what your crops use as they grow.

Each soil’s field capacity varies depending on how much sand or clay is in it. One cubic inch of coarse sand may contain 125,000 particles, while the same amount of the finest silt could contain 15.6 trillion particles! Soil particles have an astonishing amount of surface area. One cubic inch of an ordinary soil (with a mix of sand, silt and clay particles) could have a surface area of 25 square feet.

What those numbers mean is that many soils can hold 2 to 3 inches of water in each foot of soil depth, and garden soils that contain lots of organic matter can hold even more. Crop roots can reach down 4 feet — sometimes even 8 feet deep — to tap this capillary water. To be sure crops get the water they need, gardeners would ideally want to keep their soil moisture near field capacity to a depth of at least 4 feet. During peak growth, crop transpiration together with surface evaporation can draw as much as a half-inch of water per day. The more water you’ve stored in your soil, the less you will need to provide supplemental irrigation