And so here are some of the ways to address the issue. First, the single greatest barrier to first-time homeownership is a high downpayment. It is really hard for many, many low-income families to make the high downpayment. And so that's why I propose and urge Congress to fully fund the American Dream Downpayment Fund. This will use money, taxpayers' money, to help a qualified low-income buyer make a downpayment, and that's important.
One of the barriers to homeownership is the inability to make a downpayment. And if one of the goals is to increase home-ownership, it makes sense to help people pay that downpayment. We believe that the amount of money in our budget, fully approved by Congress, will help 40,000 families every year realize the dream of owning a home. Part of the success of Park Place is that the city of Atlanta already does this. And we want to make the plan more robust. We want to make it more full all across America.
Secondly, there is a lack of affordable housing in certain neighborhoods. Too many neighborhoods, especially in inner-city America, lack affordable housing units. How can you promote homeownership if people can't afford a home?
And so what I've done is propose what we call a single-family affordable housing tax credit, to encourage the development of affordable housing in neighborhoods where housing is scarce. Over 5 years, the initiative amounts to $2.4 billion in tax credits, and that will help. It will help a lot to build homes where people can— where when fully implemented, people will be able to say, "I own my home."
A third major barrier is the complexity and difficulty of the home buying process. There's a lot of fine print on these forms. And it bothers people; it makes them nervous. And so therefore, what Mel has agreed to do and Alphonso Jackson has agreed to do is to streamline the process, make the rules simpler, so everybody understands what they are—makes the closing much less complicated. We certainly don't want there to be a fine print preventing people from owning their home. We can change the print, and we've got to.
We've got to be wise about how we deal with the closing documents and all the regulations but also wise about how we help people understand what it means to own their home and the obligations and the opportunities. And so, therefore, education is a critical component of increasing ownership throughout America: Financial education, housing counseling, how to help people understand that there are unscrupulous lenders. And so one of the things we're going to do is, we're going to promote education, the education of owning a home, the education of buying a home throughout our society.
And we want to fully implement the Section 8 housing program, homeownership program. The program will provide vouchers that first-time home buyers can use to help pay their mortgage or apply to their downpayment. Many of the partners today, many of the people here today, many of the business leaders here today are creating a market for the mortgages where Section 8 vouchers are a source of the payment, and that's good. See, it's an underpinning of capital. It helps move capital to where we want capital to go.
And so these are important initiatives that we can do at the Federal Government. And the Federal Government, obviously, has to play an important role, and we will— we will. I mean, when I lay out a goal, I mean it. But we also have got to bring others into the process, most particularly the real estate industry. After all, the real estate industry benefits when people are encouraged to buy homes. It's in their self-interest that we encourage people to buy homes.
~GW Bush, June 17, 2002
Let's not place all the blame on GW. The big mortgage companies actively sold mortgages, then created sliced and diced products which combined different portions of mortgages from one area with those of another...there was no transparency. Everything was going up and up...and these derivatives (mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps) were sold all over the world...many of them to governments like Iceland, Greece, etc...and then the bottom fell out of the market and the game was exposed...which led to the banking crisis and the bailout by GW Bush...as he was leaving office...with his tail between his legs. He'd managed to accomplish what the terrorists couldn't on their own...collapse the western financial system and create havoc in the world...unfunded wars, mandates, tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, subsidies, no bid contracts, lost money...dug such a hole in the ground during his administration that all the kings horses and all the kings men are having a hell of a time putting humpty dumpty back together again...
Along comes the Republicans with their do nothing attitudes and legislation...and present the pretender in waiting...Mitt Romney...to continue the same sh*t that got us into this ditch in the first place. They drove the nation's car into the ditch and everytime Obama tries to drive it out, they point at him and scream, "Help...a black man is stealing our car"....
