Another well-intentioned but underperforming housing program meant to help struggling homeowners keep their homes winds down on Friday having met less than half of its of goal.

If this story sounds familiar, that's because all of the government’s efforts to help mitigate the housing crisis have delivered far less than promised.

The latest casualty is the Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program, which Democrats, led by former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, fought to include in last year’s sweeping financial-reform overhaul, the Dodd-Frank Act.

The loan assistance, modeled on a Pennsylvania program, was intended to provide $1 billion in interest-free loans to homeowners who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments due to job loss from the economic downturn or medical problems. The idea was to provide immediate, short-term assistance to head off foreclosures caused by rising unemployment to help not only families stay put but to also minimize further declines in home values and neighborhood deterioration.

But it took the Housing and Urban Development Department nearly a year to launch the program--signed into law on July 21, 2010, with a sunset of Sept. 30, 2011. Program administrators were not ready to accept applications until June 20. The program was also complicated by requirements both in the statute and added by HUD, and these requirements made it hard for borrowers to qualify.

Lemar Wooley, a HUD spokesman, said that instead of reaching some intended 30,000 borrowers with loans of up to $50,000 each, HUD expects it will be able to loan $400 million to $500 million to between 10,000 and 15,000 borrowers who qualified out of the 100,000 applicants HUD reviewed.

Unused funds are automatically returned to the federal government, and with fights over spending and budget deficit reduction so intense, lawmakers and consumer advocates who supported the effort feel cheated by the missed opportunity.

Frank, who had to cut in half the $2 billion he wanted for the program in order to secure sufficient Republican support to pass the bill in the Senate, said that the money was intended to extend housing-assistance efforts created under the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, which had fallen short.

He said he fought with HUD throughout the year to get the loans out the door faster to maximize the program’s relief potential and was willing to work on improvements, but that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan failed to make the program a priority.

“I think they made it more complicated than it had to be. It was almost as if there was resentment because it was our idea and it wasn’t their idea, and so they dragged it out and dragged it out,” Frank told National Journal.

Wooley said that several things doomed the program. He cited the criteria required in the statute, such as proof that a borrower was 90 days delinquent and headed toward foreclosure but would be able to make his or her payments once employed; another problem was the time constraints. Wooley said that HUD made whatever tweaks it could to make the program more successful, such as extending the window for receiving applications, giving waivers to families unable to make the minimum monthly mortgage contributions, and qualifying more deeply distressed borrowers. He added that HUD would like to see Sens. Robert Casey, D-Pa., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and others succeed in their efforts to extend it.

“As with any new program, it took some time to get it up and running. We had to get the regulations in place, and it took time to identify contractors to set up fiscal controls and ensure the program was being run fairly,” Wooley said. “The main problems we are having are based on the statutory requirements of the program and the statutory time limits. No one could have anticipated how difficult the statutory requirements make it to reach homeowners--HUD found that the vast majority, around 75 percent, of ineligible applicants were disqualified due to the statutory requirements.”

Housing counselors said that a requirement added by HUD that borrowers demonstrate a 15 percent reduction in income disqualified borrowers who patched together temporary odd jobs.

J. Oscar Ramirez, the president and chief executive of Avenida Guadalupe in San Antonio, said that his group tried to help 481 borrowers, but only 20 qualified for review into HUD’s loan port system and these applicants were still waiting to find out if they would receive money.

“We are getting a lot of folks that are hitting that 10 percent mark, or maybe 11.5 percent mark. They have had substantial reduction in income--it’s obviously impacting them because they are at our doors and applying for this program--but the program says unless you hit that 15 percent mark, too bad,” Ramirez said.