I'm headed to DC to help out from late May through early September.  I'll be working with the Obama campaign to reach out to young evangelicals.  But, am having a terrible time finding housing on the cheap.

There is a diary on the rec list, CNN reports Evangelicals for Obama. Now I have seen everything, which is actually soon to be the focus of my job.  I'm moving down to D.C. next weekend to help the Obama campaign, and some down ticket races, reach out to the under 45 evangelical vote.

It is not just CNN reporting on it, but also today's Seattle Times... Polling suggest the evangelical coalition is breaking away from being built on two issues (abortion and gay-marriage).

America faces a housing crisis that it has not seen the likes of since the great depression. Hundreds of thousands of families have lost their homes due to the mortgage crisis in the past year and more are at risk if we don't act now. That is why the US Senate must support some version of the Foreclosure Prevention Act, which passed this past week in the US House. This legislation, which is on its way to the Senate next week has been threatened with veto by President Bush.

[cross-posted from the Democracy Cell Project]

When did we know we had to leave?

Certainly the first indication was right before the 2004 election, after a year-plus of working hard, 24X7, to elect a smart, good, thoughtful, honest man to the White House.  Richard (Blogmaster for johnkerry.com, initiator of the first national party website and first online political community sponsored by a political party) and I were sitting in the car on the Sunday prior to election day. He hesitated before turning on the car.  "I have a bad feeling," he said.  "I have a sense that in churches all over America, people are being told to vote for Bush."

I am bummed out this week. I sold my house that my partner and I remodeled over the past 2+ years. Last night I cried with my realtor as I showed her this diary in my office.

Johnnie and I have worked hard to build our sanctuary from the storm, but the storm caught up with us.

We are in business litigation, so Johnnie and I are sueing my business partner. We are being forced to sell our home to pay all the damned attorney bills. I have little faith in the word Justice anymore.
I am holding out for a settlement or a buyout.

I wish I could blame George Bush but it really is a personal business dispute.

Oh WTF! It's all George Bush's and the Republican Party's fault!

Luckily I got a contract (in this crappy real estate market) for almost full price, however it is little consolation. What's money? As printers it is just paper and ink to me.

This is my sad farewell to a lot of sweat equity and a place that I thought I would stay a long time. A place where we have put in our hearts and souls.

Goodbye my Shangri-La...

We have been trained to think of states as the supposed "laboratories of democracy," but what they really are these days are a check and balance against federal inaction and Potomac Fever. That's the case I make in my newspaper column out today - especially as it relates to the housing crisis.

I am confused about something that is written in the summary portion of the proposed FHA Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act (HR 5830). Would someone who is familiar with banking and mortgages clear this one up for me?

I include a brief passage from the text of the summary, which I pulled from the official House Financial Services Committee website, below the jump.

My question concerns the "short payment." How is the amount of this payment determined? Can you offer an example or illustration of how this might work? By means of example, lets say that in 2006 I took out an interest-only loan of $400,000 for a mortgage on a home that is now worth $250,000. My balloon payment is due and I'm not going to be able to cover it. If my lender chose to participate in this program, how would it work, and how much money would the lender get as part of this "short payment?" What is a "short payment" anyway?

With all the babble regarding the collapse of the housing bubble, that house prices are dropping, interest rates are dropping, why is it that I still can't afford to buy a house?

Well, I got some news for ya, being a single income earner sucks in today's economic environment. Today, after the big shift in the 1970's of women entering the workforce, 30 some years later, the effects of the dual income household has taken a huge toll on the ability for a single person to compete in the marketplace to purchase a home for themselves.  This is my predicament.  I'm not bashing the female workforce, heck I'm one of them, but at 42, single, and spent my life building a career, I would think that at this point I could swing it - NOT!

Housing is what started the current mess me are in.  Thanks to record low interest rates from the Federal Reserve, the US consumer went on a debt-induced home buying binge.  That binge is now coming home to roost.  And it's not going to let up for the foreseeable future.

Prices for homes are down again, and the decline shows no sign of stopping.  But not all homes are equal in the falling market, and there's a new factor that's helping to determine which areas fail and which areas thrive.

But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.  The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

Last December, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced the reinstatement of its Declining Market policy presumably based on the foolishness occuring in the mortgage-backed securities market.  In a nutshell, this announcement reinstates a policy to reduce the maximum loan-to-value (LTV) ratio in markets Fannie deems to be "declining" by 5%.  What does that mean? Well, if you were applying for a loan with a maximum LTV of 100%, it means that your maximum LTV would be 95%. You would need to put 5% down.  As of June 1, the policy goes into full effect.

  After more than a year of a housing bust, and eight months of a credit crunch, its hard to believe that the real estate market could get much worse. With suburbs turning into ghost towns, major Wall Street banks going under, and people losing their homes right and left, you would naturally think that we must be near the bottom.

  And yet, if you look at the raw numbers you realize that the real estate market could get much worse. In fact, it is likely to get much worse in the coming years.

 You don't have to believe me. Look at the numbers for yourself.

Fear Itself

copyright © 2008 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

He was a beautiful bouncing baby boy.  He was born to two parents that love him dearly.  Even before his birth, indeed, prior to conception, this little fellow was the apple of his parent's eyes.  His biological beginning was carefully calculated.  As the seeds of life developed into a bright-eyed baby, the people he now knows as Mom and Dad thought of little else but Maxwell.  

I caught the following sentence in a Reuters story about G7 comments on the current financial crisis:

A year ago, finance ministers and central bank chiefs were basking in five years of strong world growth, unaware that a US housing boom was about to go bust, triggering what may be the biggest financial shock since the Great Depression.

Unaware? The housing boom was described and explained a long time before that, and its inevitable consequences were. It was discussed in exquisite detail here on DailyKos for most of the past 3 years.

But that sentence has a simple purpose:

$25 billion...that's what I'm hearing home construction companies may be getting from the government.  Congress, or allow me to really point the finger, the Democrats believe that these corporations are on the brink of collapse.  But let me ask you this, is that such a bad thing?  Meanwhile, homeowners, from those who should have never gotten a "McMansion" to those guys who were deciples of those late-night guru infomercials, are getting $8 billion.  This could change, but that's the numbers I'm finding.

Senator McCain may have flip-flopped for obvious political reasons on the mortgage mess, actually trying to propose a plan with solutions, albeit solutions that wouldn’t help many homeowners if he actually ever even supported the plan once he (God forbid) is President.  See McCain shifts aid to some mortgage holders," Michael Cooper, New York Times, April 11, 2008, at http://www.nytimes.com/...

I know I should blog on my area of expertise and Krugman's piece today on how the lack of universal health insurance lead to 27,000 preventable deaths each year only in America.

But this pissed me off and is sorta new news:

Back in February, the National Association of Home Builders and their BUILD PAC declared that they were going withhold further campaign donation to both parties unless Congress did more to help them. This could have been an opportunity for Congress to do the right thing and liberate itself from the more blatant bipartisan bribery of small dollars in campaign funds for big tax dollars in corporate welfare.

Alas.

Suburban sprawl is Mother Earth's worst enemy.  The FHA, the mortgage interest deduction, the capital gains tax exclusion and all the rest of the wealth transfers that the USA government gives to homeowners are suburban sprawl's best friend.

The only good news we have on global warming is that housing prices are crashing.  If we want to save the environment we have to let housing crash.  Real estate construction and the environment are mortal enemies.