The reasons that such a recovery is impossible at the moment should be obvious: millions of people do not have jobs; millions of others work only part time; millions more work fulltime but make very little money; and additional millions fear losing their jobs.

Under these circumstances, there can be no recovery in the housing market, which will continue to contribute to the broader depression-like economy in the U.S.

Interestingly, an op-ed article in The New York Times, entitled The 30 year Prison, actually took these realities into account when analyzing the housing crisis. The 30 year mortgage is the cornerstone of the residential housing market, which allowed millions of Americans to become homeowners.

But the economic conditions that allowed such a mortgage are disappearing. According to the op-ed author, Katherine Stone, one crucial problem of the housing crisis is that "...today’s mortgages are designed for yesterday’s borrowers."

Ms. Stone makes clear that "yesterday's borrowers" are people who could expect to have job security and were paid a livable wage. Thus, 30 year Mortgages "...work well as long as homeowners have stable, long-term jobs that enable them to regularly make their monthly payments."

"But these days such careers are increasingly scarce. Therefore, any effort to recover from the crisis must include more flexible mortgages that take today’s employment landscape, with its frequent job-hopping and episodic unemployment, into account." (August 14, 2010).

Of course banks are never very eager to be "flexible" with loans.

Nevertheless, Ms. Stone is part of the recent wave of journalists and politicians who have discovered that there is a "new normal" in the U.S. economy, which will inevitably have profound changes on how millions of people live their life. If the economy continues in the same direction it has been traveling for the last thirty years, with the needs of corporate owners overriding those of the employees, the "new normal" will demand that not only housing, but many other aspects of life be changed to suit the long-term joblessness and low wages that politicians and businessmen would like to make permanent.

Adequate housing is a basic human right. But often basic rights take a back seat to corporate profits.

Sometimes these basic rights must be demanded. The right to decent housing, a job that pays a living wage, health care, and peace could all be easily achieved in the United States if the economy were arranged with this purpose in mind. Sadly, it is not. It will take a mass movement of working people to re-arrange the priorities of those in power, or to put different people in power, so that the country’s resources are directed to those creating the wealth, or in the most need of it.

Helping jump start this movement should be the priority of every working/unemployed person. The first mass demonstrations to achieve working-class demands will be held on October 2nd, in Washington, D.C. and in other cities. Local demonstrations, community forums, or town halls can be held locally to coincide with the larger demonstrations, thus amplifying our voices. One demonstration will not be enough, but hopefully October 2nd will be the first step working people take towards empowerment, greater organization, and political independence. Once we learn to march and shout our demands in unison, greater goals can be achieved.

Hold on there. The deflation of real estate prices is not a “crisis”. It's a correction of prices. The bubble was in real estate, and the bubble is deflating. The crisis affects everyone, sure, but mainly it affects people involved in real estate.

It's a crisis to homeowners because they had money in their houses, and now the houses are worth less than the mortgages. It's a crisis to landlords because rents are flat and their mortgages are not.

It's a crisis to banks because people can't afford their payments, and the loans default. That turns into losses on their books. If they have too many losses, they can become insolvent – but a lot of this issue was fixed by the bank bailouts.

The crisis to banks turns into a credit crunch, because banks are still fearing defaults and insolvency. The credit crunch turns into unemployment, because business cannot borrow. Unemployment creates a cycle of “lack of confidence” in the economy.

It's not a crisis to renters. We stand to see our rents stay flat, or drop.

It's not a crisis to buyers. They get better deals – but right now, there's too much buying at too high a price. Prices should drop down to 2000 or 2001 levels, and we're not there yet.

The crisis is that we're suffering because these speculative assets are still on the books, and will be until 2012, when the last of the Pay Option ARMs (aka exploding mortgages) default.

The problem was that Washington was “owned” by Wall Street. Look at the main assholes in the administration: Geithner, Summers, Richard Rubin, Rahm Emmanuel. They were in cahoots with Goldman Sachs. They were all aligned with Alan Greenspan.

Housing should be a right. That should be the premise of policy. Home-ownership should not be the right, nor should profits or bank solvency be a right.

Squatting long-empty properties should be a right. Why are there homeless on Skid Row, at City Hall, and across LA when there are hundreds of vacant properties?

What we should have done is rescued home buyers, and that should have rescued the banks. The people who borrowed should have gotten an offer to get the loan canceled – and bought the homes out for some fraction of the equity the owners had. The bank should have also gotten paid a fraction of the remaining debt. The house could then be re-sold at the lower market price, perhaps to the resident.

Alternatively, the resident could have gotten an option to rent their house at market price. A rent to own option – so nobody gets thrown out. Over time, as the asset was paid off, the tax debt would have been recovered.

The big losers would have been the people who owned that debt – the investors and speculators would have lost a lot of money. That would have sucked, because a lot of that debt was held by retirement funds. But, that's tough shit in my opinion. It sucks to lose retirement money – but look at the outcome we're seeing now. Not good. Retirement money was lost anyway.

The solution to that would have been simple – a one-time expansion of Social Security to cover some of the retirement losses.

Of course, these policies could never pass Congress. The people aren't angry and organized (and educated) enough. We're mostly idiots about finance. And this workerscompass isn't helping. They might be socialists, but they still think along the lines of bourgeois society.

PS – the 30 year mortgage is bullshit. We used to have 15 year mortgages and houses used to be affordable. Access to this extra credit just inflates prices.

PPS - the last deflation lasted from 1988 to 1993. Five years. So if this deflation continues at the same rate, it will conclude in 2012. We've already been down this path - we should accelerate the deflation process in real estate, and try to save the rest of the economy from this prolonged pain.