As the nation's foreclosure crisis worsens and weighs down the larger economy, big banks are shifting gears, promising aggressive new programs to help struggling homeowners in areas like Sacramento.

One month after Bank of America Corp. announced it will rewrite 400,000 Countrywide mortgages starting Dec. 1, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced Friday it will do the same within 90 days for homeowners with loans from failed thrift Washington Mutual. Chase said it will not foreclose during that time on WaMu borrowers who might be eligible for help.

"My counselors have been having a lot of challenges dealing with those WaMu loans," said Martha Lucey, head of Fresno-based By Design Financial Solutions, a statewide loan counselor. "We hope this announcement means we're going to see more progress."

The joint moves by Chase and Bank of America may have a sizable impact on the capital region. Countrywide and WaMu alone wrote 13 percent of the region's mortgages during the peak of the housing boom, according to La Jolla researcher MDA DataQuick.

Experts said the bank moves reflect attitude changes inside a consolidating mortgage industry following several high-profile lender implosions.

"If you take BofA and Countrywide, and add in JPMorgan Chase with WaMu, you're looking at companies that service 29.2 percent of all the mortgages in the U.S.," said Stuart Feldstein, president of New Jersey's SMR Research.

Citigroup Inc., and San Francisco's Wells Fargo & Co., which recently bought Wachovia Corp., account for another 22.6 percent share, he said.

"You don't need all of the nation's 8,000 mortgage lenders to make these announcements. You only need a handful to influence the majority of the mortgage market," he said.

The Mortgage Bankers Association tracks 45 million of the nation's 56 million mortgages. The group estimates that more than 4 million of the mortgages it tracks were delinquent or in foreclosure in the second quarter of this year.

More cooperation with borrowers is also part of a growing movement led by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to limit economic fallout by modifying loans instead of foreclosing. The FDIC is rewriting thousands of loans at failed Pasadena thrift IndyMac, which was also a big Sacramento-area housing boom lender.

"Foreclosure is an expensive proposition," said Chase spokesman Tom Kelly on Monday. "If we can, we want to see if we can modify."

From booming 2004 through slumping 2007, Washington Mutual wrote 49,687 home loans in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties, DataQuick reported. Countrywide wrote another 68,421. Many of those adjustable-rate loans quickly turned into millstones for capital-area borrowers when home prices stopped rising. Thousands are struggling and an unknown number have lost their homes.

The capital region has tallied nearly 30,000 foreclosures since the beginning of last year, according to DataQuick.

Chase, which assumed the WaMu loan portfolio in September, said it will rewrite 400,000 mortgages worth $70 billion in coming months. The firm promised to lower interest rates, temporarily suspend payments and refinance some into federal programs that trim loan amounts to current home values.

It will also set up 24 new regional counseling centers.

"We don't know where they are going to be," said Kelly. "But they will be places where people can go for face to face meetings."

Kelly said borrowers will be contacted by mail and telephone with new payment options. Borrowers interested in help should also call the telephone number on their loan statements, he said.

Chase's move is the first purely voluntary effort on such a scale following a new acquisition. Bank of America's promise to rewrite loans made by its new Countrywide subsidiary stemmed from lawsuits alleging fraud and deception filed by attorneys general in California and Illinois.

Feldstein said Monday the newest bank moves have good implications for the nation.

"With fewer people actually being foreclosed upon, neighborhoods will hold up a little better. It should help home values by ceasing to put so much inventory on the market."

Nationally, he said, it may erase a huge swath of liability for endangered private mortgage insurance companies. Some believe those firms represent the next stage of a global financial crisis.

"There's been much speculation that these companies may not make it," he said. "They're paying huge claims and taking big quarterly losses."

Feldstein said fewer foreclosures give "the mortgage insurance firms a certain future instead of uncertain, and that would relieve us of another shoe that could still fall."

Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.