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The Right Way to Encourage Home Ownership

[saving money when you are living close to the edge is not easy at all.]

If you are living "close to the edge," then helping you to buy a home is not doing you a favor- even if the mortgage payment is equlvalent to your rent payment.

The reason people "weren't sold houses they could afford" is because they didn't WANT the kind of house that they could afford.

[They have shown themselves to be able to reliably pay a particular amount, and there ought to be a house they could buy with a similar payment profile.]

Your proposed program would help to artificially boost house prices, which would make that house less affordable.

Why do we always need a "crutch" in this country? We, as a people, are better than this. I wish that we could get away from the concept that every seemingly good idea has to be institutionalized.

If ideas such as this are so great, then experiment with them on a small scale. If you truly feel that this is important, then start up an organization to administer this program.

Raise the funds, find and screen the candidates, educate them, and then track them over the course of 2 or 3 years to see if it's really helping, or if it increases the risk of default, like most DPA programs do.

You'll get more personal satisfaction from this, and it won't force everyone else to participate. If it can't make it out of the "bootstrap" phase, then let it go.