Posts Tagged ‘housing market’
Monday Jr. Links!
* Who knew my politics has a name?
* Not Just Being Right, But Getting Free: Reflections on Class, Race, and Marxism. The incredible lost history of how “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.” What Was Postraciality?
* Detroit’s Underground Economy: Where Capitalism Fails, Alternatives Take Root.
* What coastal elites don’t get about heartland nihilism.
* Trump’s tax cuts would give the poor $40 each and the ultrarich $940,000.
* Jeff Sessions wants police to take more cash from American citizens.
* The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr.
* The secret life of USC med school dean.
* The Horror Novel You’ll Never Have to Live is getting its dark, gritty reboot.
* An Oral History of The Simpsons’ Classic Planet of the Apes Musical.
* In Heaven, there is no pain.
* This podcast interview with Zeynep Tufecki on persuasion and control is pretty chilling, especially about the dystopian possibilities of microtargeted algorithmic messaging.
* George Lucas finally made a change to Star Wars I approve of.
* Weird Radio Signals Detected from Nearby Red Dwarf Star.
But if you’re getting the urge to invoke E.T., temper it: “In case you are wondering, the recurrent aliens hypothesis is at the bottom of many other better explanations,” Mendez wrote.
Get lost, buzzkill! This is happening.
All the Midweek Links
* Both In Focus and The Big Picture visit the 2012 Paralympics.
* Michelle Obama did great last night, but the story of a sick little girl named Zoey whose ability to live was saved by the ACA hits a bit closer to home.
* Who’s going to be the lesser evil in 2012 2008 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 1980 1976 1972 1968?
* On reporting poverty. Related: Melissa Harris-Perry talks poverty on MSNBC.
* Mitch Hurwitz Talks to Vulture About Reviving Arrested Development.
* The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.” These results have since been confirmed.
* The real affirmative action: Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
* How many people have died because Walter White got cancer? And a Breaking Bad Fermi problem: What is a good approximation of how much money Skyler had in the storage unit when she showed Walt how she stopped counting it?
* A portrait of David Foster Wallace as a midwestern author. And more. Words David Foster Wallace’s Mom Invented.
* Report: Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Recovery. Are you interested in student debt now, old people?
* In North Carolina, Obama’s 2008 Victory Was Ahead of Schedule.
* Getting spicy: Hacker Group Claims to Have Romney’s Tax Returns.
* BREAKING: Rachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans.
* BREAKING: Social Security Administration to arm illegal immigrants with hollow-point bullets to murder taxpayers. Wake up, sheeple! The truth is out there.
* Erin DiMeglio is a third-string high-school quarterback.
* And for the kids: How We Got to Mars. The lives of the cosmonauts. HTML5 Map of the Firefly ‘Verse. And a lost interview with Ray Bradbury:
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.
