This should be obvious, call your congressperson!!!

As Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development recently said at Harvard University, when one chooses a house, one chooses so much more than a house. One chooses access to healthcare, to education, to employment. One chooses a community. The illiquidity in the current housing market, with the number of foreclosures and the lack of availability of financing to buyers and builders of housing, has effectively taken away the ability of people to choose.

To go a little further along the lines of what Secretary Donovan said, when one chooses a home, one chooses a refrigerator, a carpet, a sofa. One chooses window treatments, and lawn care, and hvac maintenance. One chooses a plumber and an electrician, etc. etc. One chooses to employ literally thousands of other people who have been or are involved in the construction, maintenance, marketing, furnishing and protecting of that home. One agrees to pay the real estate taxes that support the schools, the park districts and libraries in the area. One buys in.

So far, the current administration in Washington has helped the banks and investment houses to make record profits and pay back billions in bailouts. They have designed a whole new healthcare proposal (one could argue that if people had jobs, they could have healthcare, too, under the prior system). Yet they have exhibited a seventeenth-century, laissez faire, blame-the-victim (of the investment banks!) approach to housing which has thrown the entire industry under the bus. A "first time homebuyer tax credit" and a "move up homebuyer tax credit" is great, but it's a little like offering a person, on the verge of total exsanguination, a tourniquet. Housing is a huge part of the U.S. economy. Builders, tradespeople, and all who are involved in housing both in primary and secondary ways have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. We need some help, here, now. Please. Call your congressperson.