Patriotic Arson

It seems the worse the economy gets the more economists come out of the woodwork with different miracle cures for the problems that face the economy. The economic policies of the Bush and Obama administrations have not yet shown any signs of fixing the major problems that the economy is facing. The United States faces problems with its banks, industries and markets, but the problem that seems to have started it all was the overproduction of housing during a period of inflated demand due to government incentives relating to home ownership and the era of easy credit. Policies that began under the Clinton administration and continued under Bush and Obama promoted home ownership in a way that eventually made it possible for janitors who made $20,000 per year to buy a $400,000 house. This idea that the government could help almost every American own a home turned out to be wrong. In addition to these flawed government policies, the era of easy credit came out of the large rise in home values that the country experienced.
So I started thinking about new ideas that fell outside of the Bush and Obama plans for economic stimulus. I started thinking about potential solutions to this housing glut which has greatly lowered housing values across the country which, in turn, has decreased the amount of homes selling in the market. This cycle is picking up steam. A very important measure of housing prices is the Case-Shiller index which measurer housing prices across the twenty largest metropolitan areas. Over the past two years the average decline across the country has been a stunning 16.265% decline with only Charlotte North Carolina seeing a positive change in housing values. The hardest hit areas have been Las Vegas and Phoenix which has seen housing prices fall by 36% over the past two years. So if you bought a house at the peak of the market for $300,000, your house would only be worth $192,000 now, which places the owner $108,000 in the hole. These are the types of losses that average people are seeing in the former high population growth areas. The simple fact is that there are too many houses in the United States right now due to the previous policies to stimulate home ownership. Economists are not sure how long it will take the markets to sort itself out. I have a modest proposal that will speed up the process.
My proposal is to call on Americans to break into foreclosed houses, determine whether or not anyone still has possessions in the house, if they do then leave $50 for the broken window and move on to the next foreclosed home. However if there are no possessions and no people in the house I would suggest burning the house down or setting explosives. It is the quickest way I can think of to literally burn off inventory. To anyone seriously considering my offer I would suggest that you start off small by burning down one house a night, but when you get comfortable please do as much damage as you can. We have well over 1 million homes in foreclosure so we should get started soon. And a final word of advice to people considering my plan; please call the fire department 2-3 minutes after you light the house on fire. We don’t want the flames getting out of control. You could also help out by leaving a note for the firefighters telling them there is no one inside.
If that plan doesn’t float you boat. How about habitat against humanity? Instead of sending Americas college students on service learning trips to New Orleans like we have every year since Katrina we send them to the worst hit areas of the country to tear down these houses. It might be a harder sell to get kids to enlist if you tell them they are going to tear down houses 40 miles east of Cincinnati rather than party in New Orleans so it might just be better not to tell the rest of the crew until you arrive. I understand that building homes for the poor is a “moral” and “altruistic” thing to do. However the last thing we need is more houses no matter who they are for. We need to start thinking methodically about our problems. There are plenty of carved out foreclosed houses that the poor could live in anyway.
Ok. Some of you might be thinking that we shouldn’t tear these houses down if people could live in them some day. How about we let people live in them now. We could load up all the foreclosed houses, one by one, onto large barges and ship them to Africa. This way we are doing “good things for the world” and “helping the poor” while still fixing our problem of a supply glut. We could have an “off to Africa program” with our distressed houses and do the world some good. I am still looking for suggestions about how to get these houses in one piece from Phoenix and Las Vegas to any large body of water. If you have any suggestions please feel free to let me know at stephenmcnamee.blogspot.com. We can save the world one foreclosed house at a time.
The benefits of this plan would be to decrease the supply of houses in a quick and dirty way. Housing prices will stabilize once the excess of homes has been worked off. For those who think this is a little over the top. Why not just have the government set up a fund to buy these properties much like the TARP. Physically buying houses would be easier to explain to the American people then complex mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. The problem in housing prices is what is affecting the consumer. So let’s get started solving the route of the problem. And if the government won’t step in and buy these properties we know what some Americans will have to do for their country.