The best people who know the housing business can say about the Obama Administration's "housing" plan is that it is at least a start. Unfortunately, it will do little to help the moribund housing market.

This plan is not a housing stimulus. It is a Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (a.k.a. The HASP), just like it says it is. The question is, then, what exactly is that? And will it help?

We won't know the gritty details until next month, when the Administration outlines the specifics. But already, enough is known about the plan to determine that it will do little to help get the housing market moving again.

It has been well reported that, because of its limits on loan-to-value ratios (80% to 105%) and restriction to FHA/GSE conforming loans, the HASP will do little to help matters in the states with the four biggest foreclosure problems: California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. There was a good piece on this on the Developments blog Tuesday on The Wall Street Journal Online, quoting Zillow.com data that shows only 9% of mortgages in the Los Angeles area would qualify for help under the HASP; 12% in San Diego; 8% in San Francisco; 7% in San Jose; and 17% in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale.

In those markets as well as elsewhere, it won't help people who can afford their mortgages, those who have more than 20% of equity built up or anyone with a jumbo mortgage. In other words, the people who in normal times are the prime home buyers, the people who drive the move-up and luxury markets.

Tuesday afternoon, I spoke with Rick Sharga, senior vp at RealtyTrac, the online foreclosed-property search firm based in Irvine, Calif. I breezed past him my theory that a large number of properties facing foreclosure outside of the four hard-hit states are in urban and decaying inner-ring suburban areas. He said national data on foreclosures shows that, in raw numbers, the most foreclosures are concentrated in areas in and close around the big cities, but he also said that in percentage terms, the suburbs and exurbs could surpass the urban cores. He pointed to Colorado as an example of a state where new-home developments show the greatest number of foreclosures.

Sharga is among those who think the Obama plan is at best a good start. But, he added, "I do believe we are going to see a follow up to this."

Sharga pointed out that many of the loans in new-home developments were not obtained through Fannie or Freddie and therefore do not qualify under the HASP. He also said he believes the $1,000 annual payout for five years to those who qualify for HASP and stay current on their reworked mortgages is not enough of an incentive. And he noted that the "pay for success" initiatives to mortgage servicers were not likely to succeed since most of the mortgages that would need to be reworked have been securitized, which means they are owned by investors, who would be free to sue the servicer for losses incurred by the mortgage rework.

So the Obama plan is not a housing market plan at all. It is a $275 billion spending program that will help keep some homes in typical new-home communities from foreclosure but will probably keep as many or more foreclosures from occurring in poor and working class neighborhoods in and right around the big cities. The latter will do nothing for the housing market because home prices there typically have little effect on values elsewhere.

The plan, though, will help to keep urban neighborhoods from the instability caused by vacant foreclosed properties. Which is probably what the Administration intended in the first place. Which is probably why they called it the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.