The Center for Responsible Lending, whose work I cited the other day in looking at the number of projected home foreclosures in 2009 by Congressional District, has come out with a revised set of numbers.

And those revisions are... substantial. Both in terms of the numbers of foreclosures predicted, and in terms of where those foreclosures fall. It really changes the picture on both counts.

The REVISED top ten:

That list is considerably different, both in the districts that come out up top, and in the numbers of foreclosures involved.

What accounts for the changes? A change in methodology, obviously. Specifically, CRL says their original projections were based on information from McDash Analytics, a dataset on some 10+ million loans as reported by major mortgage servicers. This new set is reworked to calibrate them with state foreclosures reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association, since that dataset encompasses over 40 million loans. The resulting changes are supposed to reflect differences between more general foreclosure rates and specific geographic concentrations.

But I'm not enough of a statistician to tell you whether that makes sense, or even whether I've expressed it correctly.

Still, I think we should take a look at these numbers and think about what they mean as debate resumes on H.R. 1106 in the House.

10,000 to 18,999 projected foreclosures:

These revised numbers show a much greater concentration of projected foreclosures in the districts at the top of the list, and a much greater concentration of those districts in states like California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. In fact, there's not a district in the top 50 that isn't in one of these five states.

They also show that the worst of the problem, while somewhat more evenly distributed among Republican and Democratic areas than the previous list suggested, still shows a disproportionate share of the troubles landing in Republican districts. Republicans hold just over 40% of the seats in the House, but represent 60% of the top ten most troubled districts.

Finally, it should perhaps be noted that despite the claims of many conservatives that the bulk of risky loans, and therefore the bulk of foreclosures were associated with minority borrowers, Congressional districts with the highest concentrations of racial minorities do not appear to be represented in disproportionate numbers at the top of this list.