Jobs Through Growth Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I could spend my whole time talking about the housing crisis--as the Senator from Arizona has so appropriately commented--that has hit his State and mine and many others. I happen to agree it is going to be hard for us to recover economically until we can start to work off this huge inventory of houses out there and the dire economic straits it has put the owners of those houses in.

It is a truth in America that so often our family assets are in our home. When that home goes away--because you can't sell it or its value has plummeted and the bank is coming after you and you can't get loans for your small business--then people are going to be hurt. That is what is happening to our people right now.

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Mr. NELSON of Florida. Indeed, one of the areas hardest hit in the entire country is southwest Florida, in and around Fort Myers. I note the Senator's comments are very accurate. We need to find a way for people to stay in their homes, afford their payments, and see what that does not only for the individual homeowner but what it does for the neighborhood. It keeps people in the homes. The weeds don't start growing. The values of the rest of the homes in the neighborhood don't plummet because the house is now vacant and perhaps ransacked. There is kind of a spiral downward when people are forced out.

So we need a program that would come in and make the mortgage as affordable as the homeowner can work out. Yet we find, in many cases, the banks don't want to do that or there is not a governmental incentive for the banks or the homeowner to do that. We have missed out on that.

Several years ago, when this crisis started, I implored the Secretary of the Treasury to look at exactly what was happening, and they came up with a program whereby they were going to give some cushion of 5 percent of a mortgage that was underwater.

In the Senator's State and my State, if a home is just 5 percent underwater, you are rather fortunate because a home today 20, 25, and 30 percent underneath the value of the first mortgage is not uncommon. That is the problem we have not addressed.

There have been some other good things. There are now programs coming out on small business, in trying to get money into small business. Even though some of the banks did not want to take the Federal money, even though it went to their capital, we are starting to see some signs of life there. We are starting to see some signs of life, I am told by the Florida Association of Realtors, that sales are occurring all over the State, not just certain parts of the State, such as Miami. There is a huge influx of Brazilian investors coming in and absorbing the condo market. But it is not just Miami, it is the entire State that sales are occurring.

They are, of course, sales at rock-bottom prices, but they are beginning to occur. We need to accelerate and give assistance to this rejuvenation of the real estate market. Until the housing market recovers, we are not going to have an economic recovery out of this recession.

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