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Should President Obama Fix Housing First?
By: Donna Ray Berkelhammer. This was posted Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Loading ...Now that the inauguration festivities are behind us, President Obama needs to get to work. What should be first on his agenda?
According to the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange & Chatham Counties, first on the agenda should be addressing the free-falling housing industry. At the association’s installation of officers last week at Hope Valley Country Club, incoming president Bo Root encouraged the crowd to write their elected officials to “Fix Housing First.”
The premise is simple:
The housing market collapse is pulling down the entire economy, creating a credit freeze and putting hundreds of thousands of American jobs at risk. To get our economy back on track, Congress must address housing.
A housing stimulus would include a short-term incentive for qualified home buyers in the form of a meaningful tax credit coupled with a permanent low mortgage rate.
The program encourages supporting and strengthening existing foreclosure prevention programs to stabilize home prices, enhancing the Home Buyer Tax Credit, and creating below-market 30-year fixed rate mortgages. For more details, click here
Construction accounts for 3 percent of the Durham County, North Carolina economy, and is even more of the Wake County, North Carolina economy. And the bottom is falling out of the local housing market, according to the Triangle Business Journal. It reports pending sales of existing homes were off by 35 percent in November, and the inventory of homes for sale continued to increase, with the average home sitting on the market for 100 days versus an average of 72 days two years ago, according to Triangle Multiple Listing Service.
So, support our local construction industry. Check out FixHousingFirst.com, and if it makes sense to you, write your congressional delegation. And, let me know what you think.
Tags: Bo Root, builders, business, Chatham County, Construction, Durham County, economy, Fix Housing First, foreclosure, mortgage, Orange County, prevention, Triangle, Wake County
The justification for this plan cites what happened in 1975 when times were “similar.” However, it was more than FIVE YEARS to ‘jump start’ the economy and start seeing _real_ recovery. Can’t we learn from our mistakes?
No, the Keynesian ‘trickle down’ of money from the government to big banks that gave out bad loans isn’t the answer. If you want to throw money to the wind, AND help those in foreclosure, throw to those who actually are in foreclosure. This will help the banks by making the bad notes good again.
Second, the regulation that prompted this mess must be ended. Yes, it was really “nice” to get more low-income people to buy houses, but it ended up being what it was historically: a bad risk. Stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from insisting on these loans. (And, by the way – CLEAN HOUSE in both organizations, as any good company would do when their leader’s fail at their plans.)
Third: let businesses go bankrupt. They will not FAIL, they will REORGANIZE. There is already a system in place to take care of bad business practices but not let a company fail entirely. It’s called BANKRUPTCY. Chrysler and GM need to reorganize their debt so that they can continue making cars. Why are we trying to come up with something NEW just for these companies? It doesn’t help the middle class or the poor as they don’t by Chevy’s or Dodge’s anyway: they buy BETTER cars or not at all.
Posted by: Todd H | January 23rd, 2009 at 11:47 pmHello. Great job. I did not expect this on a Wednesday. This is a great story. Thanks!
Posted by: Adelina | July 10th, 2009 at 5:05 pm