Kirk Lyman-Barner says the ongoing foreclosure crisis is a national disaster and that churches should mobilize in response the same way they would if these millions of families were being displaced by tornado, flood, fire, hurricane or earthquake.
He points us to the Fuller Center for Housing’s Save a House/Make a Home initiative. (The Fuller Center is a nonprofit related to Habitat for Humanity.) Lyman-Barner summarizes the effort:
Banks and lenders with foreclosed properties donate their houses to affordable housing ministries such as the Fuller Center for Housing.
Volunteers work side-by-side with families in need to make necessary renovations and upgrade the homes making them more energy efficient.
The Fuller Center leadership prices the houses with a formula that makes sense for the local community, by the number of bedrooms or by the square foot.
The individuals and families who are vetted for need and ability to pay purchase the homes on modest 0-percent interest loans. Their payments are then recycled back into the community.
This is the basic Habitat for Humanity model. It works. It works on a very small scale — on far, far too small a scale to stand alone as a response to the foreclosure crisis. But it works.
And maybe if churches showed a bit more enthusiasm for their responsibility to address the foreclosure crisis it would help nudge the government to remember that it, too, has a duty to respond.
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Atrios highlights this quote, from AIG’s CEO Robert Benmosche (yes, the same AIG that received billions in taxpayer bailouts so that it could pay those billions to the banks whose risky gambles AIG had insured):
Retirement ages will have to move to 70, 80 years old. … That would make pensions, medical services more affordable. They will keep people working longer and will take that burden off of the youth.
The “burden” Benmosche refers to is the burden of employment. With 14 million Americans out of work and three job-seekers for every job opening, we should be lowering the retirement age, not raising it.
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Atrios also said this the other day:
They could bail out the banks simply by paying off mortgages. Instead people get chucked out, and the banksters get massive amounts of free public money.
Atrios says this pretty much every day, but it’s true pretty much every day, so I hope he keeps saying it until someone listens.
The banks were losing money because millions of people couldn’t afford their mortgages. People struggling to keep up with those mortgages cut back on the rest of their spending, so businesses were losing customers. Businesses losing customers led to millions of layoffs, which in turn led to millions more people being unable to afford their mortgages.
The response — in Europe as well as in America — was to help the banks by providing them billions of dollars in handouts and cheap loans. The predictable, obvious result: millions of people still can’t afford their mortgages and businesses still don’t have customers.
Bailing out the creditors doesn’t work because they’re still sitting on the same huge pile of shaky debt. Bail out the debtors and you wind up saving the creditors too. Jubilee works.
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Ever wonder what the “Era of Small Government” looks like?
It looks smoky.
Retronaut has a collection of photographs from Pittsburgh in 1940 — during the small-government, libertarian utopia of life before smoke control.
This is the world we could still have if it weren’t for all those big-government, socialist, tree-hugging, New-Age, hippie environmental radicals.
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