In order for someone to possibly get help for their mortgage woes, they have to be in arrears, even if they are have made their payments on time prior to needing assistance. So instead, people will stop paying their mortgages which puts them in a tenuous situation – just for the chance to get some financial help.

The real  estate subsidies that homeowners receive are being questioned in a Time Magazine article. With the $8000 tax credit that first time homeowners can receive and other opportunities for home owners and buyers, what the author purports is that these benefits or subsidies are nothing more than welfare and could cause people to buy more property than they could really afford.

Even with all this aid, though, U.S. homeowners haven’t been doing so well. The value of their real estate holdings has fallen by $4 trillion since 2006, according to the Federal Reserve. Millions of people have been booted from their dwellings over the past couple of years because they couldn’t make their mortgage payments. Millions more foreclosures are on the way. The housing market, despite some hopeful signs over the summer, remains a terrible mess.

Not all is bad in the real estate horizon, half a million people have been helped by the current administration’s mortgage rescue program, which is more than last year. Owning a home is not a right, but many people have wanted to own a home. Having a safe place to live should be something that all people have, but whether or not they own the place they live in is still debatable considering how widespread homeownership and now widespread foreclosures have made a mess of things.