When it comes to homeowners and tenants impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the response by Congress, federal and state regulators -- and even individual lenders and landlords -- has been swift. Certainly much faster than the 2008 housing recession, when too many families lost their homes to foreclosure.

But there is no free lunch, no matter how badly you’ve been hurt. If you opt to take advantage of the benefits being dangled, you eventually will have to pay the piper.

For now, though, there are no fees, penalties or additional interest. You might not even be called upon to document a COVID-19 financial hardship, thereby removing an obstacle that stymied some borrowers the last time around.

“These are challenging times,” says Michael Jensen of FREEandCLEAR, a mortgage search engine. “It is important to know that if you are struggling financially due to COVID-19, there are multiple assistance options to help you stay in your home.”

Here’s a summary of what government and private enterprise are doing at this writing to help keep people in their homes.

-- If your mortgage was sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, all foreclosure proceedings, no matter the reason, have been halted as of March 13. But owners of vacant or abandoned properties need not apply.

To find out if your loan is owned by either of these two companies, which buy loans from local lenders and package them into securities for sale to investors worldwide, check your loan documents or call the company that collects your monthly payments. You can also check fanniemae.com and freddiemac.com, or call 877-542-9723 (Fannie) or 800-373-3343 (Freddie).

-- Foreclosures on loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration have been stopped for 60 days, as of March 18. Ditto for USDA loans, as of March 19. Again, check their websites, or call the FHA at 800-225-5342 or the USDA’s Rural Development office at 800-414-1226.

“The last thing any of us wants is for Americans to lose their homes,” said Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. “If you’re struggling, immediate help is now available.”

Forbearance is available for up to a year on these loans, meaning you may not have to pay your mortgage for as long as 12 months. The rules differ -- with government loans, borrowers facing financial difficulty because of the pathogen are eligible for forbearance for up to six months, and lenders must provide an additional six months of forbearance if you ask -- so check with your loan servicer. But no matter what, missed payments won’t be reported to credit bureaus, so you credit score should not suffer.

As many as 300,000 borrowers have already inquired with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac about forbearance, according to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mark Calabria. And he expects they will field upwards of 2 million more inquiries by May 31.

One source thinks there could be as many as 15 million borrowers who default on their loans. Another suggests servicers may have to absorb anywhere from $3 billion to $13 billion in loan payments to the investors who own our mortgages.

Most people are not in trouble, at least not yet, Calabria said. For the most part, they just want to know what their options are. So be patient; phone lines and websites are likely to be jammed.

But don’t hesitate, either. Don’t be ashamed, and don’t hide out, hoping you will be overlooked or forgotten. Take the first step as soon as there are signs of trouble. And be honest. If you haven’t lost your job or can still afford to make your payments, keep on trucking.

“We’re operating on the honor system,” Calabria said in a television interview. “This is supposed to be limited to if you’ve lost your job, you’ve lost income ... If you can pay your mortgage, please do so, because we really need to focus on the people who can’t.”

If you ask to skip payments, several options are available to make up what you missed. Your loan term can be extended, the amount owed can be added to you balance, or you can make up the difference by increasing your loan payments by a certain amount until you’re even.

If you still can’t afford your mortgage at the end of the forbearance period, the four federal agencies will try to recast your balance to make the payments more affordable. But you need to have been current on your loan on the dates mentioned above, or no more than 30 days delinquent at those times.

Loan modification guidelines take in to account not just the interest and principal still owed on your original loan, but also your property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, association fees and other recurring housing-related costs.

If you can’t make the grade under the rules, you will have to sell and move on. And if you can’t or won’t do that, foreclosure is the next step.

-- If your loan is with a private lender and Uncle Sam is not involved, call that lender or your loan servicer right away if you experience any financial setback because of the pandemic. Most offer some sort of relief. They don’t want to own your place any more than you want them to.

Private lenders are not legally obligated to offer any kind of forbearance. At this writing, though, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and a couple of hundred other banks and credit unions have announced penalty-free forbearance plans, without interest, for up to 90 days. Bank of America has already processed payment deferral requests for some 50,000 customers.

Again, call your servicer -- or go online, which a Bank of America spokesman says is a “great alternative during these times of high call volume.”

-- If you are a tenant, know that many jurisdictions have halted evictions: New York (among others) for 90 days, for example, and Florida for 45. Alabama stopped evictions and foreclosures for 30 days, but rent and mortgage payments are still due.

The federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act also blocks evictions. In FHA-insured single-family rental houses, the grace period is 60 days; in apartment projects backed by Fannie and Freddie loans, it’s 90 days. About 1 in 4 of all single-family and multi-family rental properties are financed by government loans.

Many individual landlords are bending over backward, so check with your property manager to see if he or she can do anything to help.

Among other things, advisory firm RCLCO found that big-time multifamily outfits are offering flexible payment plans for those unable to make their rent, waiving late fees and offering flexible renewals with no rent hikes for 90 days. Landlord Mario Salerno, who owns 18 buildings in Brooklyn, New York, has canceled rents for all of his tenants, saying he is more concerned about their health than the money.

Rentec, a property management software company, has compiled a state-by-state guide to the various resources available to tenants: see rentecdirect.com/blog/ultimate-state-guide-coronavirus. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has resources on its site (cfpb.gov) that will help owners in their talks with their lenders.

Infestations of rats, mice and other rodents. Toxic black mold. Lead paint.

The deplorable conditions of a lot of low-income housing -- in urban areas, on American Indian reservations and in unincorporated communities along the Mexican border, for example -- is well known.

But these conditions are also found in the housing provided to our military personnel. Basically, they are the equivalent of “4F” -- the military classification that means someone is unfit to serve.

“I noticed chipping paint on our outside entry doors and on all of our windows, and became concerned it was lead paint,” a resident of privatized military housing in South Carolina said in a report to a Senate subcommittee.

“When I mentioned it to maintenance, they shrugged it off,” the resident continued. “I was told I did not have lead paint by one person over the phone. After being denied several times for my concerns, I ordered my own lead check test kit. When I tested the door and window, it came back positive.”

The report from the Military Family Advisory Network is full of troubling testimony like this about how poorly some of our service people are housed. Here’s another instance:

“My house had strong electrical currents that would severely shock you, and when we complained, they said it was ‘dry air,’” a New York resident reported. “Then an outlet blew, frying my computer (that was plugged into a surge protector) and almost setting my house on fire.

“Had to do a sit-down strike at management to get them to bring an electrician in,” the resident continued. “Turns out, my house wasn’t properly grounded, which the outside electrician said was common for these military houses.”

The report makes for eye-opening reading. After surveying some 17,000 military residents in 46 states, MFAN discovered our soldiers, sailors and airmen and women shared their military housing with a wide array of unwelcome guests: roaches, ants, fleas, wasps, bees, spiders, bedbugs, mosquitoes, ticks, crickets, worms, termites, beetles, maggots, silverfish, earwigs, rats, mice, squirrels, shrews, moles, skunks, bats, snakes and birds.

One respondent reported having 400 bats in her attic.

These problems are occurring in “privatized” military housing, in which the Pentagon has contracted base housing ownership and management to private firms.

More than half our service members live off-base, but there’s still a lot of privatized military housing. How much? The Department of Defense reports there are 202,000 such units on its bases.

News reports and congressional investigations have sparked action all the way to the top. Last fall, Defense Secretary Mark Esper met with the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as executives from some of the private companies that own and manage the properties -- outfits such as Lincoln Military Housing, Balfour Beatty, Hunt Military Communities and Corvias Military Living -- to determine how these issues are being addressed. The military services and the private managers have come up with a remediation plan that includes:

-- Establishing a resident bill of rights and common lease framework.

-- Increasing transparency and reporting service work orders.

-- Enhancing ongoing oversight and leader engagement.

-- Improving communication with residents at all levels.

But it’s not certain that’s going to be enough for some in Congress, who have denounced the shoddy housing provided for some of our military men and women and their families.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland introduced a bill to improve housing conditions for service personnel after Warren conducted an investigation and forwarded her findings to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Haaland -- whose district includes Kirtland Air Force Base, adjacent to Albuquerque -- pointed to an Army inspector general’s report that found “widespread failures by the private housing companies to provide adequate housing, and Department of Defense failures to adequately oversee its Military Housing Privatization Initiative.”

While acknowledging problems in the MHPI program, the Pentagon still supports privatized base housing. It says the initiative solved a $20 billion maintenance backlog by leveraging private finance to the tune of $32 billion to rehab old units, with a DOD outlay of just $4 billion.

Meanwhile, families at several bases have sued their property managers over what they allege are unsafe and unhealthy housing conditions.

In the latest development, the Government Accountability Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- has weighed in with a report to Congress. And Elizabeth A. Field, a director in GAO’s defense capabilities and management department, whacked the Pentagon and its military departments in testimony to a House subcommittee.

Speaking about the GAO’s preliminary recommendations to strengthen Pentagon oversight of privatized housing, Field said that while the administration conducts some oversight, some of those efforts “have been limited in scope.”

Among other things, the GAO found:

-- The performance metrics the military departments use to monitor private partners fail to provide meaningful information on the condition of housing.

-- The maintenance data collected is not reliable or consistent.

-- The reports DOD provides Congress on the status of privatized housing are unreliable.

The GAO’s draft report recommends the Pentagon “take steps to improve housing condition oversight, performance metrics, maintenance data and resident satisfaction reporting, as well as to assess the risk of initiatives on project finances.”

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this column.

We are all dreamers. We love to stargaze about what the future holds. Early in 2019, even this column got in on the act with a story about a "Future House."

But just how well do we predict what's going to happen five, 10 or 20 years down the road? We rarely look back to find out. But the folks at Angie's List recently commissioned NeoMam Studios to return to yesteryear to see how close prognostications from the 20th century came to what actually occurred.

As it turns out, some of the more fanciful ideas put forth back then were just that: fanciful.

Specifically, the British marketing firm looked at six rooms -- the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, game room, bathroom and dressing room -- as envisioned by home designers during the previous century.

"Some of the era's wildest ideas" were about these rooms, NeoMam's report says. "Sometimes wacky, sometimes idealistic and sometimes not too far off what we see in 2020 homes, these visions for the future from past generations are an untapped resource of inspiration for homeowners who want to take risks and create spaces that are unique."

The report is a follow-up to one on how previous generations imagined the houses of today would look. And similarly, the most outlandish of their ideas -- a ball-like rolling house, for example, offered by Everyday Science and Mechanics in 1943 -- failed to gain any traction.

In the latest return to the future, NeoMam discovered one prediction that everything in the houses of the 21st century would be waterproof so that the "housewife" -- men didn't do housework back then -- could just use a hose to clean her manse.

In the living room, then, the furniture, rugs, draperies and "unscratchable" floors would be made of either a synthetic waterproof fabric or plastic. A blast of hot air would dry the room's contents, while the excess water would run to a drain in the floor. Presumably, the floor would be slightly slanted toward the drain the way it is in a shower and tub. And when Mom was not doing heavy cleaning, the drain would be covered by a rug.

In the kitchen, meanwhile, refrigerators were predicted to have revolving shelves, which may not be too far off from what is available in today's models -- some of them make two types of ice cubes, for crying out loud.

Another prediction was the advent of marble countertops. But in this case, the countertop itself would be an induction-heated cooking surface. The oven, meanwhile, would be a glass-doomed unit that sat at the end of the counter.

In the master bedroom, a 1960s prediction that the television set would hang from the ceiling didn't come to pass, nor did the notion that the set's control would be inset in a bedside table. But those ideas weren’t far off. Today, we use handheld remotes to control our wall-hung TVs.

Game rooms? How about an indoor pool with partially submerged, swim-up gaming systems? Never happened.

In 1988, Robert Zemeckis, the writer/director of "Back to the Future," commissioned consultants Tim Flattery and Edward Eyth to dream up what the bathroom would be like in 2015. Some of their ideas made it in to the film, but most didn't.

One that failed to make the grade was the bio-cleanse cleaning chamber, an environmentally progressive unit that conserves water by using a steam spray and heat lamps for bathing and drying. Other failed-to-materialize items include an in-wall waste disposal outlet and a computerized medical diagnosis and treatment center.

Eight years before Marty McFly and Doc Brown flew their DeLorean time machine back and forth between timelines, famed French artists conceived of dressing rooms that contained, among other things, a machine that would cut and style a lady's hair. Not even close. Today, the closest we come to dressing rooms are oversize master baths and sitting rooms.

As far as the house itself is concerned, of the seven "sometimes astute, sometimes idealistic, often absurd" concepts NeoMam looked at in its earlier study for Angie's List, none made it in to production. But some offered ideas that weren't far off the mark.

Take the Dome House featured in the June 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. Its rotating dome would allow occupants to make use of solar energy by following the sun as it rose in the east and set in the west.

The authors of "Unfinished World" spoke of using super-light "aerogels" to create earthquake-resistant structures that would require fewer resources to build. Today, graphene aerogel, the world's lightest material, can be used in 3D printers to create all sorts of things, including buildings.

Other schemes were out of this world. For the New York World's Fair in 1964, General Motors proposed an underwater house. And from the 1920s, a glass house that would admit ultraviolet "health rays" from the sun was offered. But the glass used in the house became a commercial failure.

And then there was the aforementioned rolling house, circa 1934. The spherical innovation was intended to make remote construction and delivery of new houses easier. But it didn't. The space house offered by Science Fiction Adventures magazine in 1953 didn't fly, either.

For a look at the concepts mentioned here, as well as others in the two reports, check out: bit.ly/future-rooms and bit.ly/future-houses.