Current Home Ownership Drop is the Greatest in America Since the Great Depression : What is the Remedy?

Home ownership by Americans has been an important thing ever since the Homestead Act was passed in the United States during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln in order to encourage settlement of the American West.

How things have changed.

Les Christie at CNN Money reports in Home ownership sees biggest drop since Great Depression that:

"Thanks to the housing bust there has been a substantial increase in empty homes. The number of vacant housing units jumped an astonishing 43.8% to 15 million (or 11.4% of all housing units) in 2010, up from 10.4 million in 2000."

Aha.
So people are in our modern world now out on the streets
while others hoard and count their real estate speculative gold.

That is a fine pickle that Abraham Lincoln would not have tolerated.

Is that the America that the founders intended?

This deplorable situation has developed because we have permitted a system of residential ownership in which housing is not owned by the people living in that housing but by speculators investing in real estate to make profits at the expense of the exploited residents whose mortgage payments finance the lives of a new breed of landlords whose sole connection to property is the deed of ownership. OWNING no longer carries any responsibility.

That has driven house prices, mortgages and mortgage payments through the roof to a point where normal wage earners can not pay for them.

The price of owning residential housing no longer has anything to do with the actual cost of construction or the objective value of a real estate objects. Rather, a horde of middle-men, bonus recipients, etc., have their hands out to grab a share of the money from the mortgage bearers.

That problem in our view would be simple to remedy by laws which prohibit the ownership of residential properties -- except during the period of sale or resale -- by anyone else other than the people living in them.

To make sure that residential properties are sold at reasonable prices, laws should be passed that people owning unoccupied residential property for longer than prescribed periods should be fined or jailed as social parasites.

That would take care of that problem.

As for the protection of buyers, no one buyer or group of buyers should be able to take out a mortgage requiring annual payments greater than 25% of their sole or combined yearly net incomes.

Such rules would drop the prices of homes (residential houses) to sensible levels quickly and unoccupied houses would disappear from the scene - fast.

People with money should be investing in ideas and industries that profit mankind, not THEY profiting from the fact that their fellow men, wives and children -- who constitute the labor force that provides the goods and services of necessity that they also use -- need a roof over their heads.

Our modern world is in great need of reform, even - or especially - in America.