Affordable housing doesn't exist.

This economy thing is obviously big on everyone's minds. And I have to say that I don't know everything about it, and I certainly don't know how to fix it. I don't know all the causes of it. I know that banks were getting artificially high ratings that caused misplaced faith in them, and that there was too much lending to people who couldn't afford to pay back the loans, and that there was corruption and greed and high-level executives who knew they were living on the edge but didn't care because they personally were making money hand over fist, enough to live a life of luxury well after their house of cards blew up in their faces and they got fired.

But there is one side effect of all this mess that is a good thing. Of course, I am in the position of not currently owning a home, which means that I have the luxury of saying this. But house prices NEED to go down. Affordable housing doesn't exist anymore, and that needs to change. It is unacceptable that unless you want to live in the middle of nowhere, two hours from the nearest city and likely much further than that from the nearest ocean, you are going to wind up paying way more than you can afford for your house. A nice home shouldn't be a luxury reserved for the wealthy. It should be something that we all have access to.

I don't mean that the deflation of house prices is a pleasurable or even endurable process for many people. It's terrible for homeowners who suddenly owe more on their loans than their houses are even worth. It's also terrible for first-time buyers who suddenly can't get a mortgage even with a decent credit rating and a reasonable down payment. It's terrible for all of us, nobody more so than the people who can't afford to stay in their homes and also can't afford to move.

And it sucks that the economy is going down with the house prices. It sucks that there has been corruption and greed and that wealth is so unevenly distributed. It sucks that there's nothing fair about what's happening. It sucks that so many of us can't even afford to heat our homes right now.

But houses just plain cost too much. It's unreasonable to expect somebody to pay $400,000 for a nice house in a mid-sized city. It's unreasonable to expect somebody to pay seven figures for a nice house in a big city. It's unreasonable that $100,000 can buy you little more than a shack on the outskirts of town or a tiny condo that can't hold your family and is run by a slumlord. These are insane sums of money we're talking about. They are sums of money that almost nobody in this country can afford. And then we wonder why our national debt is equal to our annual GDP, and why people aren't able to make their mortgage payments.

A system that puts up such barriers to reasonable housing costs had to die eventually. Of course people are taking on loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. With a crappy job market, moving to a place where real estate is affordable means moving to a place where there are very few employment opportunities. This gives people who need a job the choice between living very far outside the city where they work, creating prohibitively high transportation costs and drastically reducing their quality of life and the amount of time they get to spend with their families, or paying through the nose for a livable house in a safe neighborhood that is somewhat close to work. Neither of these options is appealing. But lenders were willing to take the risk of giving large loans to people who couldn't afford it, so people made the choice to take the more expensive houses, and thus prices kept going up and up, and the whole thing was a vicious cycle.

And now that cycle is starting to break, which means our economy sucks, and it's looking like it may not get better for awhile. I'm not looking forward to that any more than the rest of you. But I do look forward to coming out the other side--and we WILL come out the other side, and even sooner if people can avoid having panicky reactions to the current situation and withdrawing their money from banks and stocks.

Because on the other side I see housing that people can afford. Maybe not giant mansions in the middle of downtown. But something reasonable, where everyone in a family can live comfortably. Everyone deserves a decent home, and we need to get back to a situation where that is a possibility for most people. It just sucks that our economy has to be dragged down along the way.