NEW YORK

HAVING COMPANIES help their employees buy, or finance, their homes would be a free-market solution to the housing and mortgage crises.

Some companies already grant their employees lavish and creative perks — such as flex-time, kid-care and even money for losing weight; and at Google you get free dry cleaning, transportation to work and time off each day to develop other business ideas.

But today, housing does not figure into employee benefits, except occasionally for the chief executive. An inadequate home can be the worker’s greatest concern and a home that is more than adequate one of the most satisfying pleasures.

With millions of companies and other organizations supporting their workers’ housing needs, home prices would firm, helping even non-employee home owners and people who purchased homes as an investment.

This is a free-market solution in which companies would be turning a failure in the economic system to their own advantage:

• A competitive edge would be gained in recruiting by offering home-buying assistance.

• A home near the company would lead to greater worker productivity.

• A depressed real-estate market in the shadow of its headquarters is not in the company’s interests, nor is the absence of reasonably easy mortgage credit at the local bank.

• The company’s existing real-estate holdings would rise in value by helping employees — a true self-fulfillment.

• An employee facing foreclosure cannot be a well-functioning worker. In our high-tech, service economy employees are the company’s most important asset. That is why the CEO of Southwest Airlines says he does not have to focus on customers or profits; if his employees are happy, then customers will be satisfied and profits will follow.

Big-city universities, such as New York University, provide low-interest mortgages and faculty housing at below-market rents. Otherwise they could not be competitive in attracting top faculty. Of course, history shows that the sooner the university bought its properties, the less they had to pay — a lesson all organizations should heed.

Large and small, private and public, organizations of every kind should consider the benefits of being a “housing-engaged employer.” While start-up and small companies might decide that housing is an employee-benefit they cannot afford, many medium and large companies are so flush with cash that they are aggressively buying back their shares, so investing in employee housing should be easy for them.

Financial firms, banks, insurers and Realtors are already in the real-estate or lending business. For these employers, turning their back on their employees’ real-estate needs seems profoundly cruel, even insulting.

Employers would be natural home lenders because (1) they’d know the borrowers better than anyone else, including their present income; (2) they can assess their future earnings potential; and (3) they are very familiar with real estate in their area. The firm’s human-resources department would have to develop policies for two basic scenarios:

• For employees who could afford their current mortgages or new ones, the company would make the loans, with the employees repaying the benefit in interest-rate reduction from an increase in home equity on its transfer.

• If the company provided the down payment, then the employee would repay the company from the equity in the house when it is transferred or from a future refinancing; and, the company receives a right-of-first refusal to buy the home.

These scenarios would have to be tweaked in the case of the employees fired for cause or other contingencies; and, tailored for the goals of the individual organization. They depend on the fact that over the long-term real-estate prices have risen due to increases in population, growth in national and global wealth and a historic inflation in currencies.

Congress can help this employer initiative by not taxing the benefit to employees. After all, if it works, companies would have helped to rid the economic system of compromised real-estate appraisers and some lenders now only bent on reaping rewards in foreclosures; and, a host of home-financing payments that now go to sub-prime lenders and financial intermediaries, including mortgage brokers, loan originators, securitizers and other investment bankers.

Unlike the government’s public-private "partnership" and many other proposals now put forth, employer involvement would have both immediate impact and be a long-term solution, and would be implemented through an infrastructure already in place — companies’ human-resources department.

Think of an America where millions of people would not be in jeopardy of losing their homes; a real-estate market that firms up and a construction industry revived; the disappearance of the need for the securitization of shaky home loans; the removal of government bail-out scenarios; and, a country where affordable home ownership is a common part of the employment scenario.

Jeremy Wiesen

( jwiesen@stern.nyu.edu).