800,000 Americans kicked out of their homes by bankers and speculators*

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There is a major housing crisis in the US.  There are so few people that need a decent place to live that there is an abundance of empty dwellings. There are no homeless people which would help.  And there are no dilapidated or run down slums so this problem of too many houses is a bit of a stickler.

If only this were true.  It is partially true though. There are too many empty residential properties in the US. The US taxpayer is the owner of 248,000 of them.  The US taxpayer owns them because the moneylenders and their agents in the government; the courts, police, sheriffs etc. drove out the families that were living in them. The burden of paying the mortgage interest to the moneylenders became overwhelming as people lost jobs, incomes or were swindled in to an destructive agreement by mortgage lenders.

Washington is “sitting on nearly a third of the nation’s 800,000 repossessed houses, making the US taxpayer the largest owner of foreclosed properties” Business Week magazine points out in this week’s edition.

When the housing bubble burst, the taxpayer stepped in to bail out the coupon clippers that caused it.  As an earlier blog pointed out, almost $16 trillion was allocated for the finance industry. Isn’t the free market swell?   The taxpayer also pays for the cost of maintaining these dwellings, keeping them in decent enough shape for that time they can be released in to the market without depressing prices.  It is important not to depress prices as investors will lose a lot of money and it will destabilize the market.  That’s why they poured milk down the drain in the great depression. There are workers who have and will be affected as their mortgages are greater than the value of their homes, something that can easily be remedied by the taxpayer taking them over without compensation to the moneylenders and lowering the mortgage to assessed new value.

So many families have been driven out of their homes, their shelter is really what it is, that a fifth of the 3.65 million homes for sale at the end of July were foreclosures.  The Obama administration’s solution to the problem is for the taxpayer to enter in to an ownership partnership with housing speculators (the same folks who got us in to this mess) rent out the homes they’ve already kicked people out of and “when the market recovers” sell the homes at a profit.

One of the major problems is that there are so many homes vacant.  “Some of the neighborhoods, you can’t move in to……there’s so many empty houses, it’s just not safe.”,  says Mark Wiseman, the former director of Cleveland’s foreclosure prevention program according to BW.

I was visiting a friend who moved in to a new tract home in a working class community in California’s Central Valley a while ago.  He lives in a 2000 sq. foot house around a man-made lake.  Sitting in his back yard I commented on the nice little lake with the houses around it.  “Most of them are empty” he said.  “People come in to the lake on canoes and boats at the other end and break in to houses and steal everything.”

“Like what?” I asked as most people had been kicked out.

“Stoves, fridges, TV’s carpets, water heaters” he replied, explaining that one boat was towing a trailer in the middle of the night with a fridge on it.

I had written about a woman, her husband and disabled child living in a motel in Turlock California, also out in the valley.  She had called me for some help with her issue.  Her husband was still working but they had been kicked out of their home by the sheriffs.  Here she was living in a motel a mile or so from her home which still had her personal property in it.  She was not allowed to enter it without a representative from the bank or a sheriff I think it was as it was “private property.”  And we wonder why people go nuts.

This is the insanity of capitalism.  A home should not be an investment.  During the boom I read one report on the boom in Las Vegas which is now one of the most distressed areas when it comes to housing.   It quoted a real estate representative saying that he was earning $500,000 a year “filling out forms”. If some of the more apathetic or pro-market workers should have learned anything form this crisis it’s that the private sector is not the vibrant force it is made out to be; it has just received trillions in welfare and been saved from oblivion by public finds.

But get this.  The government is in such a quandary it doesn’t know what to do about this housing mess that’s is dragging down the economy.  What they mean by “dragging down” is not creating a suitable environment for profit making.  But the administration’s efforts, any administration, will always be to include the private sector as they do in everything. Why, when we own these properties already should we enter in to any relationship with investors and speculators whose sole reason for letting cash go is to make profit? Why pay a middleman?

So the frustrated millionaires and billionaires that write and pass legislation in this country have asked the American people to help.  I try to keep myself informed but I wasn’t aware of this: Last month the Federal Housing Authority along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government agencies “issued a joint plea to the public for ideas about how to solve the problem” of too many empty houses.  The situation is so dire, “It’s almost like having the captain of the Titanic go on the public address system and say, ‘Does anybody have an idea?’” says Wiseman.

The bourgeois are not stupid enough to organize community meetings to get feedback from the US working class as they know they will get a mouthful and will have much less control over what might be said and what they want to make public as far as suggestions go. But they have an email to send your suggestions to, it’s reo.rfi@fhfa.gov  

A small glimpse of part of the problem

A society is far from civilized that has half a million empty dwellings, while a few million people live in shacks and run down buildings or sleep under freeway underpasses.You have until September 15^th to send in your suggestions as the government is “deluged with repossessions” says Business Week. Here is what I plan to send and think is a good start to solving the problem of too many empty houses. If you agree, send it in or something similar. 

(1)  Put all victims of foreclosures and evictions back in their homes

(2)  Reduce all residential mortgages to reflect assessed market value

(3)  For those who have lost jobs due to a crisis they never created, the government should pick up the mortgage or portion necessary to keep people housed as part of a mass infrastructure development program to create jobs

(4)  This to be paid for by ending the wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq

(5)  Make Wall Street and the bankers pay: Tax the rich at 1945 levels

*This is not the total number of foreclosures or people that have been thrown out of their homes which is in the millions