Do people know about Hillary's $10,000 for a house down payment plan? [View all]

[BernieforPres2016]

I hadn't heard this one, but Hillary was on CNN in a Harlem senior center this morning talking about her proposal to give $10,000 as a match to help young people come up with the down payment on a house. I googled it and it is not something she just came up with this morning.

http://cnycn.org/2016/02/clinton-plan-to-help-potential-home-buyers-could-benefit-working-class-new-yorkers/

<Clinton is proposing to support potential homeowners in their efforts to save for down payments with new initiatives for “underserved communities” that would match up to $10,000 in savings. The programs would apply to those homeowners who earn less than the area median income.

Since down payments are often the biggest obstacle to homeownership, this matching program would be a welcome addition to the extremely limited landscape of financial assistance currently available to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers seeking to become homeowners and to build wealth.

Right now, the city provides grants of up to $15,000 for down payment assistance through the HomeFirst program, which sets eligibility at 80% of area median income or about $62,000 for a family of three. But in the city’s hotly contested real estate market, even $15,000 is too little, and even families that earn more struggle to save for down payments.

For instance, at the low end of the market in the Bronx, the median cost of a single-family home in 2015 was $360,000, according to the Department of Finance. If the would-be homeowner were to pay the recommended 20% down payment, the buyer would need to have $72,000 in pocket. That means even middle-income would-be homeowners who could afford monthly payments are priced out of the market by those with enough cash on hand to pay out the steep down payments.

So even if Clinton’s proposals were enacted, in an overheated market like New York City, the would-be low-income or moderate-income home buyer would still be strained to come up with enough cash to afford the down payment.>

Let's restart George W. Bush's "ownership society" and the housing bubble again by trying to help young people into houses they can't afford. It worked so well the last time. This proposal is brought to us by the National Association of Realtors ($225K speech) and the major banks ($3 million in speeches) that originate the majority of mortgages in this country. Will they originate a mortgage in the Bronx, or is that a redlined area?

We can't afford universal health care even though 1.7 million Americans a year are driven into bankruptcy by medical bills. We can't afford free college tuition at state colleges and universities even though student debt has tripled in the last 10 years. We can't afford a cost of living increase for people living on $13,000 a year in Social Security payments.

But we can afford to hand $10,000 to families making $50,000 in the Bronx to help them make a 20% down payment on a $360,000 median home in the Bronx that they probably can't afford to maintain and will likely lose if they are ever out of work for 3 or 4 months.

What idiocy.