Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program to sell bad mortgages on its books.

The changes, which HUD officials will brief stakeholders and activists on during a conference call on Monday, could be made public as early as Tuesday — depending on when department lawyers give the green light to publishing them in the Federal Register.

But they won’t take effect before the next auction of HUD mortgages, scheduled for May 18.

Castro’s actions could potentially defuse an issue that activists have been using to question his progressive credentials — and he’ll be doing it at the moment the running mate search has begun to get serious at Clinton campaign headquarters.

Among the changes, according to people with knowledge of what’s coming: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a “walk-away prohibition” to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight.

HUD officials say that the timing isn’t a response to the activist pressure or the presidential campaign calendar.

“It has always been our goal to get the policy right, regardless of arbitrary deadlines, and we expect to announce those changes this week,” said HUD press secretary Cameron French.

But the changes come after two years of calls by activists — joined last September by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — for major reforms to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program. Their calculations — numbers that HUD says are way off — allege that during Castro’s tenure, 98 percent of problematic mortgages the department has sold went to Wall Street firms that they say were responsible for the housing crisis in the first place.

With the backdrop of a Democratic Party recalibrated by Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong candidacy, activists were preparing a full offensive against Castro this week, looking to leverage his political ambitions against him to extract major concessions.

Last Thursday, activists sent an ultimatum letter to HUD titled, “Seeking swift changes to HUD's DASP program,” and demanding response within 24 hours. They had set up a national day of action for Tuesday, with protests scheduled at HUD offices in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with a news conference at Newark City Hall — which remains on for now, pending whether they feel HUD has gone far enough in what the agency tells stakeholders on Monday afternoon.

“I would say we’re cautiously optimistic, but we don’t know, and what we need to see is a plan that will lead to substantially more mortgages not getting into the hands of bad actors and saving more homes from foreclosure,” said Amy Schur, campaign director for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, on Sunday afternoon. “Unless we see that, it’s going to be a problem.”

Schur has been in touch with HUD regularly over the course of the past two years, and in recent weeks when the conversations stepped up after the activists fired a warning shot against Castro by launching a public effort built around the website DontSellOurHomestoWallStreet.org.

That first attack on Castro in early April prompted a number of leaders to rush to his defense — some because they felt the criticisms were unfair, others because they were eager to protect the future of arguably the most promising Latino rising star in the Democratic Party.

“Some of y’all may have seen recently concerns that were voiced about DASP,” Castro said last week in an appearance at a National Association of Realtors event teasing the changes.

“We’re improving that and have been working to do that to ensure that folks are able to stay in their homes longer because they’re offered principal reduction in certain instances,” Castro said, “that we get better outcomes for neighborhoods by making sure that folks who secure those loans aren’t able to just walk away from those properties and by instituting something that we refer to [as] ‘payment shock protection’ to make sure that once payments are modified that they don’t just jump up a couple years later.”

Other members of the coalition and signatories on the ultimatum letter are American Family Voices, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, MoveOn.org Civic Action, New York Communities for Change, Other 98% Action, Presente.org, RootsAction.org, the Rootstrikers Project at Demand Progress and the Working Families Party.

Schur said that she and others are hoping that HUD will include some method of incentivizing mortgage sales through early bidding or favorable rates to nonprofits and neighborhood groups, rather than the Wall Street firms that have bought many of the mortgages. They feel that large financial institutions don’t care about the effect on neighborhoods from letting properties go vacant or decline, or of overwhelming homeowners with liabilities — though many argue that the reason these institutions buy so many of the mortgages is that they are the only ones that have the capital and management capability to handle the purchases.

“Where we would like to be with HUD is partnering to roll out a positive program in our cities across the country,” Schur said. “We’d rather be doing that than protesting. But if the changes are insufficient and this program is going to continue to be almost a wholesale giveaway to speculators, we’re going to have to keep the pressure up. We’re not going to have a choice.”

HUD officials point out that the May 18 auction isn’t for the DASP program and call the complaints surrounding that unfair. It is for different mortgages, called an “aged loan sale,” scheduled before these reforms were far along. No DASP auction has been set yet for 2016, and reconsideration of the program, according to French, has been underway since the most recent DASP auction, at the end of last year.

“Since 2014, FHA has made changes to the DASP program before every sale. FHA has been working on the latest round of changes to the DASP program for months, and, in our desire to be as comprehensive as possible, we’ve engaged a broad group of stakeholders on the potential reforms that would make the most impact for distressed homeowners,” French said.

Activists had been growing frustrated with the pace and substance of the conversations with HUD, and HUD officials have been losing patience with them as well, feeling that the activists are out for attention and landing on Castro simply because his name is in the running mate mix.

And, well aware that this is a critical political moment for Castro, activists warn that they’re ready to keep after him until the Democratic convention in July, and beyond that if he is Clinton’s pick.

“We would all love for the secretary to really come through in a big way, but housing activists and folks in our neighborhoods are not going to stop when our neighborhoods are being sold off to Wall Street. There has to be a major, major change,” said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change. “Folks are completely ready to keep pushing.”

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

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