The economic and housing crises have wreaked massive changes in how Americans live, as we accelerate our slide into third world status
A quarterly Census report on homeowner vacancy and homeownership states that of the 131 million homes in the US, 112.5 million are occupied and of those, 74.8 are owned. That means that about one third of the occupied homes in the US are being rented.
A smart discussion of the report at
CNBC explained that the number of unoccupied homes dropped, but that was because of a big uptick in rentals. The article observes,
Younger Americans have seen what home ownership has done to their friends and families, and many want no part of it. Credit has become very nearly elitist. Home prices, whatever your particular data provider preference might be, are still falling.
Banks, Fannie [ FNM 0.488 
0.001 ( +0.21% ) ] and Freddie [ FRE 3.28 0.01 ( +0.31% ) ] are holding on to hundreds of thousands of properties, and we don't know exactly when or how they'll sell them.
Where do you think those 18.5 million homes mortgages are being held. I figure Fannie and Freddie are holding MILLIONS of empty home mortgages. They're going to have to either rent them or sell them-- probably to investors who will turn them into rentals.
Homes have always been one way the middle class has tethered its claim to financial comfort and security. That mooring is eroding quickly, down about five percent in recent years.
As the wealthy take over homeownership, the middle class is being weakened, made more vulnerable-- another signal that we're sliding further into third world status.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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