Letters to the Editor
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Why are falling housing prices a bad thing again?
"...according to the latest numbers from the influential Case/Shiller home price index, housing prices fell ten percent year-over-year in January."
And this is a problem why exactly?
I mean it's a problem if you're a home owner who paid too much for a house, expecting to sell it for even more to someone else. I mean you KNEW you were paying too much, but what the hell, there would always be some other chump who would pay more so why not screw him?
But for those of us who would like to own a home and who have a realistic notion of what a home is actually worth, we have been locked out of the market since, oh, 2004 at least. When gross asset inflation was hitting the dot-coms it was no big deal because we didn't need dot-com stock to live--I could opt out of the madness. With housing, I am forced to play in the same imbecilic game as you bush-league Trump wannabes. I don't want to get rich. I just want a place to live. Is that okay with you?
The greed and stupidity of millions of get-rich-quickers has resulted in a vast overbuilding of overpriced, flimsy, energy-intensive, and financially- and environmentally-ruinous suburban sprawl. People like me and my friends have been gentrified out of our cheap, funky old urban neighbourhoods. All I ever wanted out of life was to live downtown, walk to work, work enough to pay my rent, read books and not bother anybody. That's all I wanted but I couldn't do that anymore because somebody thought they could turn our workshops and apartments into $300,000 condos which would be bought and flipped for $500,000. (To anyone living in Montreal, Quebec, two words: 10 Ontario.)
If you are one of those people, you're stupid and greedy, and you have destroyed my world, and you deserve everything that's coming to you. I hope you lose everything and go bankrupt because that will keep your credit rating low enough that it will be years before you can wreak havoc with your moronic herd behaviour again.