They probably did the wrong thing with mortgages-for-all. They set up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as mortgage clearing houses that repackaged the loans into investments. So the net effect made all owners with a mortgage functionally equivalent to renters with a landlord, but with fewer obligations on the financiers. If you have a mortgage, you effectively have an absentee landlord with an agent on Wall Street, who doesn't even know your name.

They probably should have made mortgages secured by land property illegal to offer, except by credit unions serving a geographical region. That would severely limit housing options in less developed regions, but at least the money invested in housing there would stay there instead of getting siphoned off to international finance centers. If your mortgage payment goes to all your neighbors, you can get it back from them every month by offering them local goods and services. If it goes to a holding company, there's nothing you have to offer that it wants, other than cash. So that cash has to come from whatever it is that your region can export.

If the only thing Appalachia has for export is coal and whiskey, then everyone with a non-locally-owned mortgage is dependent on those industries to make payments.