There is a silver lining to the housing bust, at least for some people.

As of July, mortgage companies hadn’t begun the foreclosure process on 1.2 million loans that were at least 90 days past due, according to estimates prepared for The Wall Street Journal by LPS Applied Analytics, which collects and analyzes mortgage data. An additional 1.5 million seriously delinquent loans were somewhere in the foreclosure process, though the lender hadn’t yet acquired the property. The figures don’t include home-equity loans and other second mortgages.
Moreover, there were 217,000 loans in July where the borrower hadn’t made a payment in at least a year but the lender hadn’t begun the foreclosure process. In other words, 17% of home mortgages that are at least 12 months overdue aren’t in foreclosure, up from 8% a year earlier.”

That's nearly a million mortgages where the people hadn't made a single payment since the summer of 2008, and the bank hadn't even started the foreclosure process yet.
I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands mortgages in which the borrower hasn't made a single payment in a year, and the bank has started the foreclosure process.

Of course this will mean that a tsunami of foreclosures will eventually hit, probably some time next year.