Over at the P-I earlier this week, Bill Virgin chimed in on the housing mess again with yet another well-reasoned column: Homes are good investments, not slot machines or ATMs.
In the great American sport of finger pointing and blame shifting, a new villain has emerged to explain the mortgage-finance crisis.
The fault, it turns out, lies not with incompetent, deceptive lenders, naïve, speculating borrowers, greedy, reckless Wall Streeters, slumbering regulators, bubble-creator Alan Greenspan or all of the above.
Instead, the root cause is something far more fundamental: the American belief in the value of homeownership.
Or so says an emerging theory that argues that the attributes of owning a home have been, pardon the phrase, oversold, and had the U.S. not been so hellbent on getting people to buy, much of the current debacle could have been avoided.
So now is probably a useful time to review some basics about American attitudes toward homeownership, and whether they did, in fact, contribute to the economy-shaking mess we’re now in:
- Homeownership is good. Homeownership — for the individual and for society — works.
- What’s not so good, and what consequently hasn’t worked, are the methods for encouraging homeownership and the expectations of what ownership would accomplish financially for the buyers.
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Homeownership was also considered a financial virtue, being one of the few ways average Americans could achieve long-term financial solvency. Once they saved up for a down payment on that starter home, they could use the equity they slowly built up, from their own payments, price appreciation and improvements to the property, to move up to larger or nicer homes, to maybe even — and here’s a novel concept today — to enjoy the income freed up by paying off the mortgage.Which is about the point in our story where the trouble begins.
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Eventually the markets will correct, although the price of that correction is likely to be steep in lost jobs, houses, savings and economic health. If our present calamity strips away the excesses and false assumptions, and returns an appreciation of the merits of home ownership, that might be one of the few good things to come out of this.
Bill continues to be one of the few in the local mainstream press that actually seems to get what’s really been going on, and where we’re headed as a result of this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. As usual, you should read the whole article. Kudos to Bill.
(Bill Virgin, Seattle P-I, 03.24.2008)