- Target:
- The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
- Region:
- United States of America
- Website:
- www.monolithic.com
The federal government, determined to keep the banks from failing, established new rules for home financing. Those rules helped the banks and some home owners, but they destroyed the progress being made by builders of energy-efficient, greener, homes.
The new rules prohibit appraising nonconventional home designs. Consequently banks and lenders cannot approve loans for the construction of homes that do not look like, are not constructed like, or do not perform like traditional, American homes.
In essence that eliminates anything that looks different, such as log homes and geodesics. It also eliminates anything whose construction is technologically advanced, such as Monolithic Domes.
Dear (Legislator):
Many of us are doing everything we can to conserve energy, protect human life and property from disasters, and make our beautiful planet the greenest green it can be. But while some changes are easy, some are virtually impossible.
Among the virtually impossibles is the ability of folks to secure a loan to build a nontraditional house that is energy-efficient, disaster-resistant and that does not deplete our natural resources.
Reason: Right now, banks and mortgage companies are legally prohibited from providing money for the construction of a home whose value cannot be appraised, based on similar homes already existing in a given area.
But green homes are the result of relatively young technology. So while they may have been around, constructed and lived in for the past 30 or 40 years, compared to conventional, stick-and-brick, energy-wasting, disaster-prone homes, they are few and far between. That makes getting the necessary appraisal near impossible.
Yet, property tax offices throughout the United States have no problem assessing the value of any home – regardless of how unusual or different it may be. Lenders should be able to use similar yardsticks in valuing a property.
For that to happen, we need to change the current appraising/lending rules banks and lending institutions must now follow. As an American concerned about the welfare of our country and our planet, I am asking you to initiate legislation that would make securing a loan for the construction of a technologically sophisticated but nontraditional home possible. Let’s work together and get greener!
The website www.monolithic.com has just one example of a nontraditional, technologically sophisticated home for whose construction Americans cannot get mortgages.
Sincerely,
(Your name here)
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The Financing for Green/Alternative Housing petition to The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs was written by Troy Younts and is in the category Miscellaneous at GoPetition.