We are now in the fifth year of a housing crisis in which more than 3 million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure, with millions more still at risk.

Every initiative – government or private – to stem the tide of misery has fallen leagues short in the face of continued economic gloom and the intransigence of lenders.

So it’s an odd moment to be identifying glimmers of optimism that solutions to the crisis might finally be emerging. Yet that may be the case.

Over the next few weeks, several initiatives aimed at reforming the foreclosure process, holding mortgage lenders and services accountable for their past abuses, and creating more effective mortgage workouts are coming to a head.

They’re moving sometimes along parallel lines and sometimes at cross-purposes, but they’re moving.

First, some context. The complexity of the foreclosure crisis stems from the process of bundling hundreds of thousands of mortgage loans into securities and selling them to investors.

Typically, banks and other lenders retained almost no financial interest in the mortgages they originated, other than the duty to service them – collect payments and pursue delinquent borrowers, say – for which they received a fee.

Several drawbacks to that system emerged when the housing economy […]