There is no such thing as a middle class, only people who are slightly better off than the rest of their proletariat brothers and sisters.

iow, the above is just another liberal article in support of the status quo.

Home "ownership" for ordinary people has always been an illusion because if you get laid off and don't pay your property taxes the government will seize your house. The property tax for home "owners" is equivalent to the poll tax for voters.

The price of Homes is not true measure of their "Value". It is a measure of how much the market feels it can extract from a given homebuyer.

Prices are manipulated via Zoning bylaws , the artificial creation of "land shortages" and economies that by design need to "Inflate prices" in order to have growth.

If you take the materials/labor that goes into a home it considerably less then what people pay for that home.

If one is paying 50,000 in one jurisdiction and 500000 in annother for the same size house/lot then the difference can only be attributed to the "Market" . I suggest this means that a great percentage of a new homes cost is due to "perception" and "speculation".

Given this it seems clear to me there no reason at all that low cost housing could not be provided to every citizen.

(My Grandfathers 7 bedroom home built by the hands of himself his sons and their neighbours cost two years savings and he was hardly a wealthy man though they did supply their own timber , another story entirely)

For housing to be more affordable the prices have to go down. One sure way to accomplish that is thru foreclosure and/or short sale. The government has been interfering with that process thus denying new buyers teh opportunity to own a home.

"Some of this is due to misguided policies enacted by President Barack Obama, and much of it is due to cynical obstructionism."

Mr. Obama would beg to differ, I'm sure. If Mr. Obama were, in fact, not that bright, then you can call it misguided. After all, there are plenty of other people who could advise him and tons of literature on the subject (as many of us have been reading and educating ourselves). But Obama is bright, right -- the sharpest tool in the shed, shall we say.

As for the obstructionism, well, the Republicans members of Congress -- and the Blue Dogs -- are allowed to blather on and on, and never asked hard questions about what they would propose.

And as for questions of Obama, if he is asked pointed questions, well, he's simply very good at dancing around them and speaking in generalties, and never answers the question. There have been many examples of this.

And this is the problem. Obama and his Repub/Blue Dog friends are never challenged.

The only other comment I have on this is the definition of middle class. Who is the middle class? Whenever I hear anyone attempt to answer that question it's like opening Pandora's Box.

Low cost housing.

Are you talking about the initial cost of the house, which means that the materials you use will not last you four years? Do you mean that you will use really low end insulation, so that your heating and cooling bills are so high that you are actually contributing to your poverty and global warming by using the industrial energy?

The single family home, on an independent piece of land, that hogs energy, and requires your time and energy for upkeep.

They have been built cheaply, so that the people who put them could make maximum profit. For a century they have been built the same way, and they have caused real harm to the environment and the economy.

Habitat for Humanity, which is a racket for those in the loop, builds similar projects.

No one has thought about doing it differently. The size of these monsters has grown 3 fold. In the last thirty years, the worst of the damage has been done. The materials used in these houses is killing you.

Couple this with the middle class dream of being affluent, and they buy these material and energy hogs making real a mirage of a dream. It has established a lifestyle that is anti human.

When we make affordable housing, it has to be designed well, and energy efficient. Such examples are found in new east germany. It is not a new Kebrini Greene.

The social seperation the suburbs have caused are well known.

As an architect, now umemployed, I would love to have the opportunity of putting together such a complex layout of buildings. It would be a dream.

Love
Zero

To make a middle class requires a tax structure that says nobody is better than the rest, or earns their income without the help of the rest of society.

Tax the rich (over $300K per year: my definition) at greater rates until income over $3 million is at 90%!

That's how you grow a middle class. Housing is a second tier concern

The original American reference to a "middle class" probably comes from Britain. It referred, as on the continent, to the propertied but untitled yeomanry of the countryside, the rising burghers in the cities, and the mercantile classes as a whole. It was an accurate naming. What was to become the bourgeoisie really did originally stand between the aristocracy and the property-less classes.

The next stage in this evolution was the rise of the absolute monarchies with the former middle class becoming a major, and sometimes equal, pillar of the state, alongside the aristocracy (the "Third Estate" in France, as an example). In Britain, this evolution was stillborn in many ways because the British bourgeoisie came to power much earlier than in many other countries (in the Civil War of 1648). The English bourgeoisie followed regicide with a “restoration” of a slavish monarchy, and then merged the old aristocracy with itself. Large estates became alienable, titles could be bought and sold, and the monarchical institutions became largely ceremonial. In turn, the middle class "gentlemen" of the 18th century really were an income tier - possessing enough property to avoid the coarser trades but lacking the wherewithal to buy title and transcendence. The Americas were colonized by such... or at least the local power descended from such.

At this point, the meaning of middle-class diverges. On the Continent, the middle-class came to be a description of the mass of small property holders, owning their own means of production but typically employing only their own labor or perhaps a handful of others and even that, often seasonally. This is the infamous "petite-bourgeoisie" and it owed its infamy to its instability. Aspiring to raise itself within the ranks of the property owners on the one hand, it was continuously expropriated and diminished in numbers on the other. The story of the next 100 years of European history is precisely that story.

In Britain, a similar process transpired, but with two counteracting influences. Just as in Europe, the lands were "cleared" and the small holders were expropriated, but at the same time the British mercantile monopolies bore fruit. A worldwide colonial empire was transformed into the engine of capital accumulation and its essential product was the industrial revolution. In both cases, it was not just a vast army of proletarians who were created but also a sea of unusually skilled “labor aristocrats”, specialists, managers, colonial officials, minor civil servants, and professionals of every type and description. This was more a new social stratum than a class, but it echoed some of the perspectives of that which came before it, and it was dependent on and wedded to the social system of Empire. It was not so much that the proceeds of Indian labor went to London bank clerks, as it was that Indian banks were located in London… certainly their management and their hierarchy of favored positions was located in London. This is the genesis of the transformation of the British middle-class, from a continental to an Imperial definition.

That British middle-class, the source of endless political stability and social philistinism, lasted as long as the Empire and industrial ascendancy did. The bankruptcy of that Empire after WW2 and its rapid dismantling also ended the rein of middle-class politics. Politics, in turn, was just a reflection of the decomposition of the “class”, itself. While middle-class nostalgia was producing Thatcher Tories, the British standard of living was falling to the same level as that of Italy or Portugal. Today, few such illusions remain, although a “New” Britain has risen in the nexus of EU and American economics.

With this allegory in mind, it is possible to look at America. While, the origin of the term may be British, for most of its history, the American middle-class went by a Continental definition. America was a “middle-class” country from its inception… built on “free” land (in the dual sense… i.e. also “freed” from its former inhabitants). As late as the decades after the Civil War, 70% of the population owned their own means of production, even if it was modest in most cases. The subsequent transformation of that status was partly the operation of the very same forces as we have already described and partly the result of the flood of European immigrants, recently freed from their property. Daveparts has referred to the backwardness of rural America in the 1930s. On this, he is quite right. In approximately 60 years, the population of freeholders fell from 70% to less than 10%. It is less than 5% today, once the various tax schemes and contractor rackets are abstracted away. The story of America before the War is the story of The Grapes of Wrath and in no way could the U.S. be accurately described as a “middle-class country”.

So what has changed, since? Was it FDR, the New Deal, Democrats… a new “Enlightenment” perhaps? In fact, it was a positive outcome to the Second World War. What Britain lost, the U.S. inherited. And among that inheritance was a new definition for “middle-class”, adopted from the English. Social mobility, the movement up the division of labor, a certain level of prosperity, advancement through education… and all of it made possible from industrial ascendancy and the fact that Indian banks were now located in New York. The end of that era comes with globalization. It makes little difference whether the new era produces a new capitalist competition or whether the very success of American Empire relocates Indian banks to India. The inevitable result will be the decomposition of the American middle-class and there is not a single political perspective which promises otherwise. It is the division of misery in the decline that is in question.

All attempts to paint the existence of the middle-class as an aspect of “politics” or policy, positively or negatively, are simply wrong. The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads.

The status quo has got to go. The "security" that is behind the desire of "home ownership" will only arrive when people realize that we must care for one another. This is also known as right relationship. A system that tolerates and encourages a few having much more than they need while the true needs (food, clothing, shelter) of masses of people are inadequately met if at all must be seen as criminal and dismantled.

It is time to separate the banks and brokerage firms. Banks should be in business of providing credit cards, checking and savings accounts, business and consumer loans. Brokerage firms should not be allowed to be involved in banking. There should be a wall between the two and the same owner could not own one of each. Savings and Loan companies should be started again with the sole purpose of providing savings accounts and making home loans. This was the norm and it worked very well until the politicians and lobbyists worked to allow banks to own brokerage firms. Savings and Loan companies decided they were at a disadvantage when this happened and they lobbyed to be allowed to do the same. Remember the big Savings and Loan scandals? That was not unlike the recent bank scandals. Too many risky loans were made and a lot of outright stealing occured.

It is time to stop the cycle from repeating.

Fannie and Freddie should be 100% governmental agencies. They were places for hacks to spend time and amass fortunes in the tens of millions of dollars before moving on, or back, or whatever.

Put Fannie and Freddie in a lockbox and throw away the key, i.e., wind down their businesses once and for all. Adopt the Canadian model for mortgage industry practices. As I understand it, their system has no government backing and functions on good, old common sense banking management and makes individuals responsible for unpaid balances even after foreclosure. Guess what, you better damn sure you can afford the mortgage or keep renting! Oh, Canada has just as high a home ownership rate and they didn't have a meltdown. What's the difference in the US? Big government/Wall Street middlemen gaming the system for their own purposes.