Posts Tagged ‘housing market’
Cleveland vs. the Recession
Across America, recession-fueled foreclosures and plummeting home values have left countless properties abandoned and vulnerable to looting. As Scott Pelley reports, the problem has gotten so bad in Cleveland, Ohio, that county officials have demolished more than 1,000 homes this year – and plan to demolish 20,000 more – rather than let the blight spread and render nearby homes worthless.
Surprisingly Busy Today
Surprisingly busy today, but I do have some links:
* As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince delayed until July.
* The market for sport utility vehicles is starting to look a lot like the housing market, spreading pain to consumers, automakers and dealers.
* …but SUVphiles should take comfort that it’s not yet looking like the housing market in Detroit:
The fact that a home on the city’s east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America’s poorest big cities.
And it still took 19 days to find a buyer.
* Out: the carbon crisis. In: the oxygen crisis.
* Good news on the solar front: two large solar projects are being announced in California, which when completed “will produce as much energy as a small nuclear reactor or a large coal plant.”
* And yet another airline not to fly: American.
Federal regulators announced Thursday they will seek fines totaling $7.1 million against American Airlines over maintenance issues and problems with its drug- and alcohol-testing programs.
The Suburbs
The question is not, as Ryan Avent asks while guest-blogging for Ezra Klein, whether high-energy prices will destroy the suburbs. It seems clear that they will, at least to some extent, and more importantly it seems clear that these energy realities exist in a context with other, perhaps more immediate trends that point in the same general direction: America’s cities are on the mend, and it’s the suburbs that now face decline.
The important question, then, is not whether all this will happen but how suburban America will react to the fact of re-urbanification, which will have dire financial consequences for those who have concentrated the bulk of their wealth in the prices of their suburban homes. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, increasingly choose to live in cities, prices will rise there and fall in the suburbs, which over time will essentially wipe out those people whose suburban residence is also their primary or sole investment.
These people will have every financial incentive to fight to keep the suburban lifestyle intact, no matter what the cost in money, energy, or sprawl. And they’ll vote, demanding pro-suburban incentives and policy counter to every consideration of sustainability or good sense.
This will be not only a geographic fight but a class and intergenerational one as well, and if you’ll allow me to make a Big Prediction for a moment I fully expect this to be one of the more highly contested divides in American politics as we face the end of cheap energy and the accordant, dramatic weakening of our automobile-centric culture.
UPDATE: There’s more of this sort of speculation at Freakonomics, Political Animal, and Matt Yglesias.
The age of the anti-Cassandra
Krugman on the age of the anti-Cassandra.
Cassandra had the gift of prophecy — she saw, correctly, what was coming — but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.
Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.
Welcome to Condo Hell
The condominium market is about to get worse as many cities brace for a flood of new supply this year — the result of construction started at the height of the housing boom.
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The new building comes on top of unprecedented supply. The U.S. finished 2007 with a supply of condos large enough to absorb 10 months of demand, the highest level since the National Association of Realtors began the tally in 1999. Via Eschaton.
Suburbia’s End
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”
In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”
In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty…
Suburbs: the new slums. See also.