Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg of AEI have published a sobering survey on how Americans feel about their economic prospects. Consider the following:

In an April 2010 Gallup poll, 38 percent were very or moderately worried about not being able to pay their rent, mortgage, or other housing costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation responses have been a little higher. In their June 2010 poll, 47 percent said they were very or moderately worried about not being able to pay the rent or mortgage. Worries about this aspect of life are greater now than they were in the earlier part of this decade. Jobs and rising prices are a much bigger concern for Americans than declining real estate values.

My decidedly unscientific sense is that that the news media has paid closer attention to anxiety surrounding stagnant or falling home prices rather than the than worries about not being pay housing costs. Part of the problem is that clumsy mortgage modification efforts have been a failure, as David Dayen of the left-leaning news site FireDogLake has reported in considerable detail. You don’t have to agree with Dayen’s take on the situation to recognize that something has gone badly wrong, and that we’d likely be better off with some kind of right-to-rent proposal, as suggested by Andrew Samwick and Dean Baker back in August of 2007:

There is a simple way to allow troubled homeowners to stay in their homes without also bailing out the mortgage issuers and speculators.
Congress can pass legislation granting current homeowners the right to stay in their homes as long as they like, simply by paying the fair-market rent. In other words, no one gets tossed out on the street, as long as they can pay the rental value of their house. The fair rent would be determined by an independent appraiser — exactly the same way that a lender is supposed to determine the size of a mortgage that can be issued on a home.
Under this plan, homeowners would turn over their property to the mortgage holder. This would generally not be a loss since borrowers currently face crises precisely because they owe more than the value of their house. If the value of the home exceeded their debt, then they wouldn’t have to sign up for the program.

One gets the impression that we’re not likely to see a proposal along these lines at this point. But it does seem like a decent way to prevent foreclosures from spiraling out of control and blighting neighborhoods without creating yet another bailout for the financial sector.