Are you trying to find a foreclosure prevention counselor? Are you wondering how the foreclosure mess has impacted renters? Maybe you’re trying to track proposed housing-related legislation in Springfield?

There’s now a one-stop-shop web site that pulls together this information – plus lots of other stuff on the foreclosure crisis – for the Chicago region. It’s http://www.regionalhopi.org/ and it just launched yesterday.  The non-profit Woodstock Institute, known for its research on housing issues and foreclosures, is managing the site.

The web site is the work of the Regional Home Ownership Preservation Initiative, an interesting collaboration of more than 70 organizations spearheaded by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,  the Chicago Community Trust and Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago.

Perhaps their biggest achievement to date has been pulling together south and west suburban Cook County communities to team up regionally to apply for federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program dollars. Those dollars are to be used to revitalize neighborhoods hard-hit by foreclosures as a way to reverse the decay and crime that arise in areas with clusters of empty homes. The leaders of the suburban towns came together and decided to approach revitalization projects across boundaries, rather than competing with each other for limited pots of money.

The Cook County Board of Commissioners recently announced that $12 million of the county’s NSP dollars will go to the south and west suburban collaboratives. Metropolitan Planning Council has been working with the communities on this project and issued this press release detailing how the areas will use the money.

Michael Berry of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago says the idea for the regional Home Ownership Preservation Initiative piggybacked on a program called HOPI started in 2003 by Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago and the city of Chicago to cope with foreclosures that were already hurting certain Chicago neighborhoods. That was long before the subprime mortgage crisis exploded nationally.

Berry says groups around Chicago began to coalesce around the issue two years ago.

“The financial markets were getting roiled by spring of 2007, and by summer it was clear this wasn’t going to be an isolated problem anymore,” Berry says.

By 2008, all the organizations came together to lay out their goals and came up with four task forces. One addresses home ownership counseling and legal aid, another addresses refinancing and financial products, a third focuses on foreclosed and vacant properties and a fourth on research. You can read their action plan here.