Hi, I’m Alfred, your average lower middle class citizen. I work in the photographic industry as a digital color corrector. I certainly hope most people would consider that what I do for a living contributes somewhat to society in general. I think what  I  do, plays an integral part in creating family heirlooms, you know, the pictures you hang on your wall, just some of the few things you might gather in evacuating your home in the unthinkable event of a wildfire, but I digress. I make more than minimum wage, a modest income, if you must know. However, over the last twenty years or so, since the 80’s I have been watching the price of housing steadily incline and than begin to skyrocket in the earlier part of this decade. I do also realize that approximately for the last year and a half, the price of real-estate has began to level off and now has dropped substantially, and I think that’s a good thing. I do have to give credit were it’s due. Throughout this time and evan now. I have always dreamed of owning my own home. It has been said by my parents and people from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s generation, that the price of a home one can afford, should not exceed more than three to four times one’s annual income. Up until this recent real estate crash, it has not been an exaggeration to say that particularly in California, a home of evan the smallest size, condos included, cost at least TEN TO FIFTEEN TIMES YOUR AVERAGE ANNUAL INCOME, based on an hourly wage of 18 dollars per hour let’s say, or $33,000.00 per year. I think this is outrageous, and is testament to just how economically out of whack this country’s ideology has been escalated to be, when it comes to home ownership. And I am tickled pink that the house of cards has finally fallen. I don’t blame the bar-rowers for this mess weir in, I blame the lenders, for putting in tiny microscopic print instead of LARGE BOLD PRINT on the front page of their mortgage contracts, that the adjustable rates were going to kick in and go up allot higher, in some cases twice as much after a year or so. And guess what, I  bet you if they had put the truth in BOLD PRINT probably more than half of those buyers would not have signed those contracts to purchase homes or condos, thus the cost of home ownership would have never got this ridiculously high to begin with. I know a lot of you reading this, may have a knee jerk reaction to disagree with what I’m saying here. And if you do, I am not offended nor surprised. After-all, we have been brainwashed, conditioned to believe what we have been told, taught about so called ethics and fairness when it comes to home ownership. We also have been led to believe that it was practically a god given right that, just because we purchased a home we were entitled to gain positive equity, and for many years, for the most part, this may have been true. I mean, lets just hypothesize for a moment here, and take this false logic to it’s ultimate extreme. just suppose for a moment, we went on for another twenty or thirty years gaining 10 to 20% equity on a given piece of property. That would probably mean the average income earner would need to make a annual six figure income just to afford a roof over their head, owned or rented. If there was ever a time for me to tell it like it is, this is the time. If we ever want the cost of housing to remain reasonable, we must set aside the greed and this primitive pissing ground attitude, and accept the truth in fairness. You know they say, the three basic needs for mankind is food water and shelter. Well, I think its safe to say that food and water are still within reasonable price perimeters, and hopefully they will stay that way. And no, I haven’t forgotten that a home is the single most expensive thing one can buy, of course, so don’t evan go there. But lets face it, if you went to the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread, and you couldn’t find one for under $20.00, wouldn’t you think that was just a little bit ridiculous? As I mentioned in the beginning, I create family portraits, for a living, and yet I can’t evan afford a home of the smallest size to hang my pictures in. Between the cost of healthcare, auto insurance, gas, food, utilities, etc, it makes it next to impossible to save up for a substantial down payment on the smallest of places to live. I also realize that the higher the cost of housing goes, the more property tax revenue the state gains. So you might say the state of california has a vested interest in keeping the property values as high as they can. But you see the problem with this reasoning is this. If you are fortunate enough to come up with that down payment and get into a home when your fifty years old let’s say, on a thirty year fixed rate, your going to be eighty years old by the time you pay off that mortgage. I believe it is in this country’s best interest to have most citizens owning their homes by the time they retire at the age of sixty five or  seventy. I know you might think this is crazy, but if this could happen, senior citizens would be less dependent on government between the start of their retirement and when they passed on. This could also stimulate the economy, create jobs and so on. I also think we should do away with adjustable rate mortgages. I believe adjustable rate mortgages create a huge disincentive, especially for people like myself, to risk putting a large down payment of say 30 or 40 thousand dollars, only to find in a couple of years the dammed mortgage could go up over your head and you end up loosing your home and all that money that may have taken you over a decade to save up. Thats A VERY BIG RISK!!!  I know if I could, land a reasonable fixed rate mortgage deal, with ten to twenty thousand down, get into a home, I’d probably be down at the local real estate office tomorrow. Than shortly after that, the home improvement store every chance I’d get.