Congress must address housing slide

With our nation in the midst of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Congress must be willing to take bold and decisive action to spur a housing and economic recovery. Unless we are able to halt the slide in home prices, the nation’s housing and economic woes will continue to grow even worse. This is why a robust housing component must be an integral part of the new economic stimulus package under consideration by the incoming Obama Administration and new Congress. A failure to stem the decline in home values and jump-start home sales will result in more foreclosures, more problems with troubled mortgage assets and an increasing inventory (already at record levels), which in turn will drag down property values even more. In order to break out of this downward spiral, we need to get skittish home buyers back into the market. To stimulate demand, Congress should enact a meaningful tax credit between $10,000 and $22,000 available to all qualified home buyers, coupled with an aggressive interest rate buy-down program to as low as 2.99 percent for those who purchase a home in 2009. These measures will stabilize home prices, prevent future foreclosures, restore consumer confidence and start creating jobs. Congress enacted similar policies during an economic downturn in the mid-1970s. It worked then. And it can work again. Robert K Pierce, president Pike County Builders Association