I'll go out on a limb here and say I like the basic idea. One major detail I would change is to make it a $100,000 or $50,000 minimum instead of $500,000. There are many parts of the country where it's hard to even find a house that's as expensive as $250,000. I'd like something like this to be open to all parts of the country and I'd like it to be open to middle class as well, not just wealthy people.
Why do I like it?
* Fill vacant homes (as opposed to urban blight)
* There are many indirect economic benefits like money spent fixing homes, all the day to day purchasing that will be done by the new residents, etc.
* In some cases, individuals will be able to rejoin relatives more easily.
The urban blight thing is the one I care about most. I live in the East Bay of California and have seen certain neighborhoods totally fall apart as dozens of vacant homes attracted vandalism, drugs, and other forms of crime and caused remaining residents hardship.
Well, the places where it's super hard to find a house at 500k, and somewhat easy at 100k, are the border states... New Mexico, Arizona, Texas (and Nevada). In these places, the 500k house is going to be the cream of the crop... the top 1%. Southern California is a different issue, but this isn't going to help the places where the housing market really took a shit, like Nevada and Arizona, because the market there is saturated with foreclosures of homes that might have originally sold for 500k but are probably worth half that much in the current market. The poisonous idea is that these homes were actually worth that much money, but they never were. The artificial demand of the sub-prime mortgage crisis pushed prices up where they should never had been. The 500k limit would try to, again, artificially inflate the worth of the house by stimulated demand in the highest priced homes, homes which should probably sell closer to 350, because the 150k premium might be worth it for some families to get a visa. The second problem with this thinking is that anyone who qualifies for a 500k house would likely be rich enough to get a visa in the US anyways as an investor.
A lower limit of 150k would be reasonable for boosting the middle class, and actually helping the housing market, but that's obviously not the goal.
You're assuming that the people will live in the homes that they buy. They could just as easily spend $50,000 on a shack in Detroit, let it continue to decay, and just live in an apartment in Palo Alto.
Of course, I guess that loophole could be closed in the legislation, but every patch I can think of for closing it has its own loopholes.
If I were the author of such legislation I would do everything I could to require that the person actually live in the house. Possibly even including (as a condition of the program) unscheduled visits to the house to see if they're really living there. But it could be that the authors' intent is different than mine. I'd like to slow down (or better yet reverse) urban blight, first and foremost.
Given the 500k/250k amount, one might suspect that propping up home prices in the mid to upper part of the market is the intent.
Why do I like it?
* Fill vacant homes (as opposed to urban blight)
* There are many indirect economic benefits like money spent fixing homes, all the day to day purchasing that will be done by the new residents, etc.
* In some cases, individuals will be able to rejoin relatives more easily.
The urban blight thing is the one I care about most. I live in the East Bay of California and have seen certain neighborhoods totally fall apart as dozens of vacant homes attracted vandalism, drugs, and other forms of crime and caused remaining residents hardship.
EDIT: formatting