U.S. taxpayers own roughly 248,000 of the 800,000 repossessed homes. We should create enterprise zones to encourage businesses in areas with high concentrations of foreclosed homes to expand and new businesses to relocate there combining business development and job creation programs with a 21st Century Homestead Act (the "Act"). The Act should enable employees of the firms to buy homes with sweat equity and low interest rate mortgages that help train the homeowners to rehabilitate the homes and finance the rehabilitation. Likely sponsors of such efforts might be Home Depot and Lowe's.



