Excerpt
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And we turn to another kind of look at the election. We call it Missing Issues, important topics on the American agenda that neither candidate is spending much time discussing.
Tonight, our subject is housing.
It was the housing bubble that helped lead to the financial crisis in 2008 and has continued to drag on the national economy.
There's been better news recently as the housing sector has shown new signs of life. Just today, a new report found sales of new homes rose 5.7 percent in September. That's the best pace since April of 2010, and continues an upward trend in recent months. And the average price of new homes has risen more than 14 percent in the last year.
But big problems remain. More than 20 percent of U.S. homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owe more than the value of their home, and some 950,000 homes are in the process of being foreclosed on currently.
Last October, Mitt Romney took a largely hands-off approach to the problem.
MITT ROMNEY (R): Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run it's course and hit the bottom.
JEFFREY BROWN: But by January, the Republican hopeful was quoted by The New York Times as saying, "The idea that somehow this is going to cure itself, all by itself, is unreal."
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