Always Look on the Bright Side…

George Will’s got a great column on the mortgage market and the deeply flawed legislation being presented to address it. One point he makes I think has been conspicuously absent from the debate is that there are actually upsides to lower housing prices:

Do young couples struggling to purchase their first homes concur with the sudden consensus that the decline in prices is a national misfortune? The Economist reports: “Monthly payments on a typical house with a 30-year mortgage and 20 percent downpayment were 18.5 percent of the median family’s income in February, down from almost 26 percent at the peak — and close to the historical average.”

By this measure of housing affordability, the “crisis” is welcome.

That’s (obviously) not to say that some people aren’t losing out as home values slide.  But for a lot of people, especially the young and mobile who had been potentially priced out of an inflated market, the drop in prices could be a boon.