Obama's Failed Housing Policies: Housing Prices Continue to Fall
Today, S&P released the Case-Shiller housing price indices for November 2011; the headline numbers were month-over-month decline of 0.7% and year-over-year decline of 3.7%. Here in Chicago, the news was much worse: down 3.4% month-over-month and down 5.9% year-over-year.
Housing prices are now back to mid-2003 values, meaning that anyone who has bought a house during the past nine years has lost money, and the vast majority are now “underwater,” owing more on their mortgage than their house is worth. We are now less than 1% away from the post-crisis low of 2009, and heading further downward.
There can be no more of a damning indictment of the Obama administration’s failed housing policies (HAMP, HARP, HAMP2, HARP2, etc. and now the proposed Robo-Signing Settlement); except, of course, for the 2.1 million homeowners currently in the process of foreclosure, the 1.8 million homeowners who are seriously delinquent on their mortgages, and the estimated 3 million former homeowners who have lost their houses to foreclosure since Jan. 2009.
The government came to the aid of the Wall Street bankers with the $700 billion TARP and the $7.7 trillion in Fed loans; is it really asking too much for the government to come to the aid of homeowners with a viable restructuring program that would stanch the economic hemorrhaging from foreclosures. This would require a program similar in magnitude to the TARP, but one that could be structured so that participating homeowners would pay back the government’s investment through shared future appreciation of their properties. Instead, the administration continues to look for yet more ways to funnel even more government aid to the Wall Street bankers, while Main Street borrowers struggle to hang on to their homes.
