Letters to the Editor
-
Always Higher
While I certainly think we have a housing problem, and even a bit of crisis, I'm also little weary of quoting such and such number is the highest since the dawn of time. I would expect that number to be highest just given population growth. Statistics really should be at least normalized on a per capita basis.
-
Overbuilt Credit
I'm not sure what the number of homeless has anything to do with available home inventory. Were there many fewer homeless at the peak of home occupancy in 2005?
What is the proposal? That people donate their vacant properties? Should they donate the electricity, water and cable too? Where did this obligation come from, and when did I sign up for it? What about those homeless who are also without a car for access to employment? GM has many months of inventory on hand, just like US home sellers.
Perhaps the government (taxpayers) should buy these homes from owners and grant them to homeless to live in? At what price will this be done? How many newly-minted "homeless" will appear to collect their due?
The housing inventory is an outcome of home overbuilding and purchasing that directly resulted from artificially low interest rate policies and available credit put in place by the Federal Reserve. This all serve to bid up the price of housing, making homes much less affordable for everybody. It is now unwinding, and as the price of these homes falls, buyers (who might be renters today) will enter the market.
To allow this problem to solve itself and begin to enable private charities to fund homes for the homeless in need, the government should stop interfering in the markets and allow home prices to fall. This means raising rates, protecting the purchasing power of the US dollar, and putting a stop to the preferential homeowner tax treatment that further contributed to these price escalations.
-
What Kind Of Housing
I also wonder what kind of housing is unoccupied (and where). When the housing market was booming, I saw a lot of houses going up, but they were almost all monstrous McMansions. Smaller, more affordable houses were being ripped down to build huge homes. This was particularly bad in the Northeast, where half a million dollar "teardowns" were everywhere, but I saw it in other areas, too. (Not to mention the rental apartments that were being torn down or zoned out of existence so that more "luxury units" could be built.)
It was always questionable whether there were enough wealthy home buyers to afford all those luxury homes, but I'd guess that the numbers are dwindling even more, now. However, a 6000 square foot McMansion is never going to drop in price enough to make it affordable to a struggling family, no matter how far the market falls. Especially if that family isn't paying for it with a subprime mortgage and counting on 25% yearly appreciation to make the payments.
-
@bostonMA
I'm going to give you the benifit of the doubt and assume that you don't regularly read WTWW. No one, particularly not Andrew, suggested that you, I or the government give every homeless person in the US a home...or a car...or cable or a phone or free electricity.
The artificially low interest rate and the vagaries of easy have been a problem that this feature has been pointing out regularly for as long as I've been reading it. You can't blame the Fed alone, Citibank, Countrywide, Bearstearn and a host of others lenders and underwriters are at least equally responsible, but then people like you always like to blame government first. And are usually the first to call for a government bailout of business when they manage to get federal inspectors off their backs long enough to really mess things up.
Private charities have never been a solution for anything and only people who like having a poor, desperate underclass to exploit ever thought so. As for protecting the purchasing power or the US dollar, 7 years of record or near record fiscal and trade deficits, created or agrivated by a fool that I'm 100% sure you voted for twice, have pretty much gauranteed that that can't be done.
So, plese take your ingorant, troll ass back to Free Republic and leave the thinking people alone.
-
@KayWWW
It's the same on the left coast. I haven't seen a modest home with a real yard built around here for 10 years. Everything that goes up is 3500+ sqft on a lot barely big to hold it. And now they're mostly standing empty because the pool of people who can afford the payments on the 3/4 million dollar home has long since been used up.
-
Thought-provoking
Its interesting to see this reaching a statistical record. All other things aside, it gives us some perspective on just what this means - record amounts of unoccupied homes as a percentage of homes built. One can discuss reasons, impact, etc., but it's nice to have some numbers to work with.
A little inspiration for HTWW on some statistics that may be worth crunching
* How long does it take to sell a home now compared to the past, how far has that been charted in history, and how has it changed? Have sales dipped below the level of people selling/abandoning/otherwise getting rid of their homes?
* What's the average amount people are paying for these unoccupied houses per month?
* How many of these homes are underwater loan-wise, and how does that stack up against non-selling, occupied (or rental, etc.) homes?
* What's the geographic demographics?
We could definitely crunch some numbers around here for further discussion. Certainly these are things I'd like to know.
-
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
An interesting set of aggregate statistics....
Questions:
Where are these houses? Are the preponderance of them in economically depressed areas where you would expect unsold homes left over as the owners fled the scene or are they also heavily in economically prosperous areas which would in fact suggest overbuilding?
What are the median and average values of these houses for sale? This would be interesting to know because when I'd drive around the St. Louis area (where I lived before moving away from lots of people), you'd see signs all over for these housing developments: from the 150s/the 250s/350s etc. I'd think to myself, How can somebody making 30/40/50 even 60K a year afford these houses? Why do I never see ads for houses in the 60s/70s/80s/and 90s? Is it greedy developers who don't want to build something unless they can make big bux on it or is it that the accumulated weight of noxious rules, regulations, and bribes to get a sewer hookup or the cost of materials such that it doesn't make sense to build a cheaper home? I dunno. Frankly, if the glut is in those odious McMansions from the 350s, I'd laugh all the way to the home improvement center.