Your housing idea would end up being as unsuccessful as the push to lend to unqualified buyers. Once someone is in a subsidized house, you'll never be able to throw them out if they quit working. There are still Katrina refugees in travel trailers.
Ordinarily, I’m a great believer in American agribusiness, but there are a peculiar chain of circumstances that could change this.
As happened at the start of the Great Depression, even with the Dust Bowl, there was a huge overproduction of corn, so much so that many farmers were burning it for fuel. (Wheat dropped to 25 cents a bushel (currently a little over $7/bu)). Yet there was no distribution to people who were starving.
But corn, as it is produced today, is very reliant on petroleum at several stages of its production and transportation. Just a year or two ago, it was realized that the fertilizer slurry pipelines are insufficient to maintain production.
And if there is a disruption in US Treasury bills, the credit the US uses to buy petroleum could be cut off, giving us just a matter of weeks of the buffer currently in the refinery system. This could double or triple fuel prices, and result in widespread fuel shortages.
Ironically, while production was being slashed, this would markedly increase the demand for corn based ethanol.
Anyone’s guess what could precipitate a crisis, but these are just some of the dangerous variables that exist today.