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President Barack Obama announced a housing initiative to help homeowners with federally guaranteed mortgages refinance their homes on Oct. 24, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada

President Barack Obama announced a set of new rules Monday designed to make it easier for homeowners to refinance their mortgages even if they owe more than their home is worth.

Bay Area lawmakers had pushed hard for the changes, which eliminate some fees and ease rules on refinancing home loans owned by the government-controlled mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For more than a year, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) has been pushing legislation that would force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help people reduce the amount they owe on their mortgage.

In a statement Monday, Boxer said she was "very pleased" with the new changes and would urge the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, "to move swiftly to assure that these new policies will help as many homeowners as possible.”

On Oct. 6, four House members from Northern California — Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Palo Alto), Mike Thompson (D-Napa), George Miller (D-Richmond), and Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) — met with Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the FHFA, to urge him to do more to help struggling homeowners.

A source familiar with the meeting said it was contentious, with Eshoo asking the chief of the finance agency if he had "ever met with any family that has undergone this foreclosure process."

The source said DeMarco told Eshoo he had not.

In a statement released Monday afternoon, Eshoo called the new rules "a positive first step" but "not enough tough."

"Up to a million families nationally could be helped, but there are two million underwater homeowners in California alone," she said.

Consumer advocates also worry that, like previous efforts by the Obama administration to help homeowners, the new rules lack the teeth necessary to force the major banks to participate. In July, the nonprofit California Reinvestment Coalition released a report on the administration's flagship anti-foreclosure program, the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, calling it an abject failure.

Of 568,630 borrowers requesting loan modifications in California, 46 percent were denied immediately, the group found, while just 23 percent of those who applied received a permanent modification. The other third of the applicants were either stuck in temporary trial modifications or had their modifications canceled.

Monday's rules revise a different program, called HARP, or the Home Affordable Refinance Program, which first launched in 2009. 

Industry participation is not mandatory — a fact that worries some advocates.

"My concern is on implementation," said Maeve Elise Brown, head of Oakland-based Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, a nonprofit that provides foreclosure-prevention services to homeowners. "Some of the largest servicers have shown an unwillingness to go along in the past."

According to the federal government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will issue details about the changes under HARP to banks by Nov. 15, but "since industry participation in HARP is not mandatory, implementation schedules will vary as individual lenders, mortgage insurers and other market participants modify their processes."