Kaptur Proposes Helping Young People Buy First Homes
January 6, 2016
By: Tom Jackson, Sandusky Register
January 6, 2016
College student debt is rising in this country. Meanwhile, home ownership is dropping, and there are millions of vacant homes across the country.
For U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo, all of that represents an opportunity.
In an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, Kaptur argues for a pilot program that will help young people get started on becoming homeowners.
The piece, "Unleashing the next generation of homeowners: Renegotiate student loan debt," advocates a new federal policy allowing young adults struggling with college debt payments to acquire their first homes.
"In 2014, the percentage of houses sold to first-time homebuyers dropped to 33 percent, the lowest level in three decades," Kaptur wrote in her piece, which says that there are nearly 17 million vacant homes in the U.S.
"Last year, more than 57,000 homes sat vacant in my congressional district alone. Just in October 2015, there were more than 5,300 homes in my home state of Ohio that remained on the market for nine months or longer," Kaptur wrote.
Meanwhile, more than 40 million Americans have an outstanding student loan, up from 29 million ten years ago.
Kaptur suggests a pilot program, run by the federal government, that would allow students to make payments on first time homes instead of their old college loans.
Kaptur's piece is vague on the details, and her spokesman, Matt Sonneborn, explained that various ideas are being kicked around.
"The proposal right now is for a pilot (e.g. small scale) test of a few versions of the idea to see what works and might be viable to scale up nationally," he explained.
There's no legislation yet. Instead, Kaptur hopes that federal agencies such as the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Treasury and Education will collaborate on pilot programs.
"The major push right now is to get HUD, Treasury and Education on board to do a pilot test of a few versions of the idea to see what works and could be scaled nationally," Sonneborn said. "Once we have recommendations from them, we could move forward with legislation but that’s speculative and would depend on what we learned from the initial test runs. The focus right now is on getting that pilot testing off the ground so experts, stakeholders, etc. can iron out the best way to move forward."