"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 on the streets while others hoard their gold.
That is a fine pickle.
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.
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 housing has almost nothing to do with the actual cost of construction or the objective value of a real estate objects.
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, 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.
People with money should be investing in ideas and industries, not profiting from the fact that their fellow men, wives and children, who constitute the labor force that provides the goods and services of necessity, need a roof over their heads.
