[pjc50]

The alternative would be to wait for her house to be repossessed and then pay for her rent, which would probably be a greater figure; and in the short term the local authority would have to house her and the children in a hotel until they found a suitable house. Along the way she would lose the vast majority of her personal possessions.

It only pays interest, not principal, and it's conditional on receiving another benefit.

[branchless]

Feels like a safety net for the banks that she happens to benefit from.

We badly need a massive crash in house prices. This woman's case is pretty exceptional and emotive so I don't think it's a great example.

In general we need a huge crash and to hell with the few who bought in near the top. All future generations are facing turning over most of their wages to the banks without a correction.

And yes you correctly point out we need property taxes.

As I said stop using this one person as an example it's not helpful for a discussion of policy. We can all cite disabled people negatively impacted by high prices as a counter-point.

[pjc50]

No, it really is part of the housing safety net and always has been. And I think it's not all that rare either: people generally only stop paying their mortgages as part of a life collapse (unemployment, divorce, bereavement). If you want to engineer a price crash try realistic property taxes rather than throwing the disabled under a bus again.

[branchless]

Just read something that made me think of this:

    When the workers swelled the ranks of the poor, the government stepped in once more — 
    this time to assist capitalists who petitioned for tax-funded favors.
    As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains, 

    “England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a system of poor relief supplements 
    to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve.
    The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers 
    whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...

Just like tax credits (and housing benefit).

The UK establishment have been "helping" the poor for a long time.