Fifty Million

Uncle Sam wants to sell his house. His houses, that is. In fact, he has hundreds of thousands of houses to sell.

Uncle Sam owns houses all over the United States because he foreclosed on them. Uncle Sam doesn’t want to own houses. He has sold a bunch, but he’s stuck with the worst.

Some of the houses have been stripped and peeled to the bone. Some stand unfinished; others need to be torn down.

Some of the houses stand out like a bad tooth in nice neighborhoods. Some stand together like a mouthful of bad teeth in neighborhoods where nobody lives anymore, and nobody wants to live.

Uncle Sam has a new plan for selling his houses, and Californians don’t like it.

The plan is to package these houses together, thousands of them per package, and offer them up like grab bags for investors to buy. The minimum bid for each package is fifty million dollars. Yes, that’s right, $50,000,000. The investors must remodel or rebuild the houses, and agree to rent them out to tenants for at least one year.

The idea is to bring families back to ghost neighborhoods, reseed swaths of blight across the country, and bring life back to dead zones.

Californians don’t like the idea because the state is reseeding on its own. The California market is absorbing foreclosures, and life is coming back to dead zones.

The president of the California Association of Realtors, Le Francis Arnold, put it this way: “It’s a terrible idea for most California homeowners and small investors. So strong are sales of foreclosures in our state, the inventory of properties has fallen to levels considered low even in a normal real estate market.”

At fifty million a pop, the likely buyers for Uncle Sam’s houses are Wall Street investment syndicates, hedge funds and institutional investors.

“The government should let small local investors participate who have a stake in their own communities,” said Arnold.

“Wall Street does not need another gift at the expense of taxpayers.”