Another damaging round of home foreclosures may be on Brooklyn's horizon.

And two prominent federal lawmakers, U.S. Representatives Edolphus "Ed" Towns (D-NY-10) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY-11) are blaming the problem on a combination of high unemployment and the negative fallout from skyrocketing mortgage interest rates being charged by banks for adjustable loans.

But Towns, a 14-term veteran of the House who is also Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said that all may not be lost for homeowners facing the prospect of losing their properties. He said that some of them could benefit from a federal foreclosure program designed to ease the pain caused by the economic crisis.

"We are hoping that the new program, which has been put in place to prevent some of these foreclosures, will work to people's advantage," Towns said. "It's true that we may be facing another round of foreclosures and it's a shame that this is happening. We have to bring about a solution to the foreclosures for people who have lived in their homes for years and have paid their mortgages but have lost their jobs, someone in the family may have died, or the fact that they have gotten into a bad mortgage and can't pay.

"Many are now being told that they can no longer live in their houses. That's a real shame and we are a better county than that."

A root cause of what was happening in parts of Brooklyn was the "bad mortgages" homeowners have negotiated, including thousands from the Caribbean. They accepted adjustable rate mortgages whose rates have skyrocketed, thus putting the properties out of people's ability to pay.

"That's one part of it," Towns explained. "Another is the hard fact that many people have lost their jobs. There are some situations I am aware of in which two people who were paying the mortgage and one had lost a job. In others, a family member has died, leaving one wage-owner to meet the mortgage obligation.

"There were two checks to pay off the mortgage but now there is only one coming in."

That's where the new housing foreclosure program comes in, he explains.

"The person who is working will only have to pay 30 percent of their income for housing," he asserted. "That's going to protect a lot of people facing foreclosure. If you had two checks in the family but now you have one, that can be devastating, then you would be able to pay only 30 percent of your income on the mortgage. That would help some people. The program is taking effect right now and we are hoping that people would take advantage of it."

But for it to succeed, banks, some of which were bailed out by the federal government at the height of the financial crisis, must cooperate, Towns insisted.

"If the banks don't cooperate, it's not going to work," he added. "We have to make certain that they cooperate. Banks have received federal money and we are saying to them you have to cooperate.

"We made a mistake by not attaching some regulations to the money that we gave them. But the point is we have to let them know that they have a responsibility and an obligation to deal with these foreclosures."

For her part, Clarke said that tragically far too many people "went for the subprime mortgages," planning on multiple jobs and rent from apartments to pay the loans.

"The trouble is that many of them have been hit with a double whammy: the adjustable rates and the layoffs," she said. "Unemployment isn't allowing them to carry the load. We definitely have that expectation of another round of foreclosures in my district and in others, including Canarsie where a large portion of Caribbean middle class now live. It is hitting them very hard."