WASHINGTON — The Senate yesterday passed a bipartisan package of tax breaks and other steps designed to help businesses and homeowners weather the housing crisis.

The measure, titled the Foreclosure Prevention Act, passed by an impressive 84–12 vote, but even its supporters acknowledge it’s tilted too much in favor of businesses such as home builders and does little to help borrowers at risk of losing their homes. The plan combines large tax breaks for home builders and a $7,000 tax credit for people who buy foreclosed properties, as well as $4 billion in grants for communities to buy and fix up abandoned homes. “Quite candidly, what we’ve done does not quite live up to the title,” Senator Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, who is the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and the measure’s top sponsor, said. “We have more work to do. We do not do enough in preventing more foreclosures in the country.”

Democrats failed to win approval of ideas such as giving people threatened with losing their homes the right to seek more favorable loan terms from their lenders in bankruptcy courts.