Today’s Times news analysis, “Ailing Banks May Require More Aid To Keep Solvent,” concludes with a tenuous assertion.

On the idea of using government funds to buy bad mortgage-backed securities from flailing banks, London Business School economist Richard Portes says that “the taxpayer money would be used to acquire assets, and behind most of those securities are mortgages, houses, and we know they are not worthless.”

But unoccupied houses in poorly constructed, badly located developments are wasting assets. They are quickly becoming, if not worthless, worth closer to zero than they are to the original values that back their mortgages.

An unoccupied house can go back to nature quickly, requiring more dollars to repair than the potential resale price would warrant.

Today’s abandoned house in a sparsely populated, remote development is tomorrow’s quarter-acre of vacant land in desert or swamp that nobody wants to redevelop for a decade or more.