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Whether you voted for Obama or not, you should appreciate his efforts to slow the number of housing foreclosures across the country. Residential foreclosures hurt everyone: families, lenders and neighborhoods. (Try selling your home for a good price when foreclosures dot your neighborhood.) Nobody benefits when a home falls into foreclosure.

That said, the federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (http://makinghomeaffordable.gov) hasn’t nearly met the lofty goals that the administration set for it when the program began in 2009.The program, of course, provides financial incentives to mortgage lenders and banks to encourage them to modify the loans of homeowners struggling to make their mortgage payments each month. The goal is for lenders to take steps to reduce these monthly payments, something lenders can do by reducing the principal balance on the loans, dropping their interest rates or extending their length. All of these options can drop a homeowner’s monthly payment.

The Washington Business Journal reported that the program had helped more than 66,000 homeowners in the United States modify their loans through December of last year (http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/morning_call/2010/01/loan_modifications_trail_estimates.html). However, that doesn’t come close to Obama’s goal of helping 3 million to 4 million homeowners.The DC stats are interesting, too. In the District, lenders working through the program modified 2,500 loans through December, according to the Business Journal story. About 27,000 additional mortgages were in the trial stage.

These numbers, too, aren’t quite as high as they should be. There are a lot of homeowners in DC struggling to make their mortgage payments. There are a lot who need the help of the modification program.

But, it seems rather unhelpful to simply complain. The modification program has, at least, helped 2,500 homeowners and will hopefully help more in the near future, too.

I won’t pretend that the program is infallible. It’s not. Some homeowners who’ve had their loans modified are already falling behind on their new payments. But no foreclosure-prevention program is ever going to be perfect. Foreclosure is a messy business. We should applaud any program that helps keep homeowners in their residences, even with whatever flaws it may have.

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