Yesterday's announcement about a new federal initiative to help housing finance agencies, such as VHFA, received attention in a number of media outlets.

Here's a list of what we've come across:

News broke this afternoon of a new federal initiative to help housing finance agencies, such as VHFA.

The plan is part of the Obama administration's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.

Read about it at the U.S. Treasury site.

The National Council of State Housing Agencies (NCSHA) has put together a nice collection of resources pertaining to the plan.

The Valley News published a piece yesterday looking at workforce housing in Vermont/New Hampshire's Upper Valley.

In a nutshell, "Home prices are still beyond the means of many people in the Upper Valley."

VHFA's Sarah Carpenter, Maura Collins and Leslie Black-Plumeau provided some opinions and statistics for the story.

Read Chris Fleisher's full story online.

As a coda to our announcement a couple weeks ago regarding VHFA's top mortgage loan originators, today we named our top five participating lending institutions for fiscal year 2009:

1. Chittenden Bank
2. New England Federal Credit Union
3. Universal Mortgage Corp.
4. Mortgage Financial Services
5. Heritage Family Credit Union