A little history lesson, as we watch the government sponsored mortgage entities, AKA Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, rapidly dissolve into bubbling cesspools of irretrievable debt, does anybody recall the gross failure of the public housing programs of the Great Society? I DO!
For those of you too young to recall, I’ll give you a little history lesson. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the liberal Democrats and the country club Republicans who were running the country at the time decided they knew best how to take care of the poor, abused and downtrodden in our society, LET’S GIVE EVERYBODY A FREE PLACE TO LIVE! If we do this, all of these poor people will have a fair chance to succeed and prosper and then all will be joy and love in the world!
And those in charge at the time decided so it should be and the government began building enormous housing complexes, or as they became lovingly known, PROJECTS, all across the land. And the construction labor bosses were happy because they had all of our tax money they needed to buy up block after block of property, in many cases condemning and taking working peoples property and build block after block of incredibly shoddy boxes for all these poor people to live in. And all was good and we lived happily ever after! …..
Except… Since there was no sweat equity involved in obtaining one of these wonderful abodes, there was basically no PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP and the conditions of the property rapidly declined. Since they were built with little quality control oversight, and the people who built them had long taken their money and moved on with no forwarding address they continued to decline. And then there was that whole crime thing, you know when the gangs began to flourish and the drugs permeated the areas, these whole areas, formerly referred to as neighborhoods prior to government intervention, became known as just “HOODS” and continued down a rapid spiral to total collapse. And this was known as the government revitalizing a poor neighborhood? AMAZING!
Fast Forward to the Boom of the Nineties…
We won’t hear anything mentioned about the failed government attempt at affordable housing from the 60’s and 70’s, but we’ll start to hear about how important it is for the poor, abused and downtrodden in our society to have an affordable place to live. That way they will all have a fair chance to succeed and prosper and then all will be joy and love in the world!
But this time, the liberal social scientists learned from their previous experiment. Rather than building giant shoddy housing complexes, they decided to use the then strongest components of our economic base, the housing and banking industries, to bring their wonderfulness to YOUR neighborhood. They decided, “Let’s set up these giant Government Sponsored Entities to strong arm, through implied government guarantees, our mortgage industry to provide loans for “affordable” houses to people who, even though they had the best intentions, couldn’t afford to pay them back.” And the boom was on, and the same type of unscrupulous people who built the PROJECTS of the 60’s and 70’s rushed in and proceeded to build poor quality “entry level” “affordable” housing, knowing there was plenty of “implied government guaranteed” dollars to buy them. And all was good and we lived happily ever after!…
Except… Since there was little or no sweat equity involved in obtaining these wonderful loans and properties, there was basically no PRIDE IN OWNERSHIP and the conditions of the properties declined. (Does this sound familiar?) But this is where the story changes, now rather than having miles and miles of uninhabitable boxes to be torn down, these geniuses have interspersed these properties in neighborhoods all across the land. Then as neighborhoods where large numbers of these homes go into foreclosure they drag down the value of the properties all around them. This causes a lot of truly hard working people who try to do the right thing to lose a lot of value in their largest single asset. Ah, nothing like the wonderful idea of shared responsibility, better known as SOCIALISM.
Originally written September 29, 2008 and this is still happening today, almost eight years later.
God Bless America! And America, Bless God Again!
