Home wreckers: We own ‘em, so why don't we just tear ‘em down?

    I am not an economist, nor do I play one at this blog site.  But I know just enough to be dangerous in my thinking that, maybe, as a Wall Street Journal columnist suggests today, we should start taking the wrecking ball to thousands of abandoned houses across the land. Holman Jenkins Jr. has made this point before, which I faithfully regurgitated here, but some ideas are worth repeating.
    The ugliest component of the housing mess is oversupply, a couple of years worth of inventory in places like

Miami and Las Vegas.  In many towns, people unable or unwilling to pay their mortgages left the premises to the rats, including the human ones, a long time ago.  These abandoned, sometimes firebombed homes are eyesores that affect the marketability of homes down the block.  And then as those neighborhood homes are added to the inventory of the unsold, if not the un-saleable, the cancer spreads.  You don't need six years in medical training to figure out that if you can cut out the cancer before it spreads, you do it...
    ...unless you are among the brilliant minds that manage such things for the rest of us.  The government has spent more than $1 trillion in mortgage bailouts since the beginning of the mess.  And now, that same gang is shoveling another $300 billion into the incinerator, the equivalent of trying to stop an un-rushing train by tying blonde, innocent Nell to the tracks.  It strikes me, as it does Mr. Jenkins and the others he quotes in his excellent piece, that $300 billion would buy thousands of abandoned houses. 

    We, the taxpayer, who are now paying to prop up our foundlings, Freddie and Fannie, would probably get a pretty good deal from the banks, too.  Those houses are more than an eyesore to them.  We own the mortgage lenders, they own the abandoned homes, so let's buy them, blow them up, clean up the neighborhoods, and start all over again.  Or simply hand out axes to the mayors of Newark and Camden and Toledo and Miami and let them fix the problem.  Whatever will bite into the oversupply will certainly help things along. 

    There is zero creativity in Washington, so maybe it is time for a little creative destruction.

    If you can't get to the article by clicking here, let me know and I will email a copy to you.