Why not just have the ‘give back’ as points payed on the loan (and possibly rolled into the principal) rather than putting a cap on future equity.. which would only discourage people from maintaining their property. I just object to the idea of basically having a ‘partner’ (the government) sharing profits in my housing investment. Very un-American.
There aren’t many “pure” options here, it’s a mess to put it mildly. The purist approach would be to let it go down and rebuild from the ashes. As appealing as that is to some, and I admit to occasionally thinking that way myself, the years of getting from point A to point B are likely to be miserable and even frightening. There is no guarantee that our current form of governance would survive such an ordeal, and there’s no guarantee that we’d like what arose in its wake if it didn’t.