7 ms·

Why can't people choose how to spend their own money? People choose to live in more expensive homes. They choose stainless steel appliances, solid wood floors

Why can't people choose how to spend their own money? People choose to live in more expensive homes. They choose stainless steel appliances, solid wood floors, etc. All things that make the houses of the 70's look quite paltry. Again, the only reason we care in general is if we have to bail this people out because they chose homes they couldn't afford. In the natural order of things (if there is such a thing), if a homeowner couldn't make their mortgage, house goes back to bank. Banks don't want houses (no profit) so they naturally try to avoid people who are likely to stop paying their mortgage. Enter gov't interference, guaranteeing loans, etc and you have a huge distortion. So we(as a nation/gov't) probably should't have gotten involved in the housing market in first place.

bokonist 17y ago
If you break out the numbers further, it's land prices that have been responsible for the housing price increases, not the cost of construction. The main culprits are zoning laws. It's simply not possible to build duplexes or more densely packed homes in most suburbs, and so all the land gets spoken for and no more housing can get built.
- cperciva 17y ago
  The main culprit are zoning laws. I disagree. The Vancouver area is one of the most expensive in the world for detached house (median house price > 10 x median income), but that's not for lack of denser housing options. I don't know anyone under age 40 who has even considered buying a detached house here; the default option is to buy a condo in one of the many towers which are going up, and the expensive "yuppie" option is to get a townhouse. Land is expensive because people want to live close to the city center; not due to excessive zoning restrictions.
  - dantheman 17y ago
    But excessive zoning restrictions exacerbate the problem. In Cambridge, MA there are significant limitations on how high buildings can be thus limiting construction of larger apartment buildings. This in turn drives up the cost of housing due to the lack of supply.
  - bokonist 17y ago
    In the Boston area, where I live, the central city and inner suburbs have bans on how high a building can go and generally make it extremely difficult to get building permits. I've heard it takes up to 10 years and millions in lawyer fees to get a permit to build a new apartment tower. The mid to outer suburbs have strict laws against duplexes, have minimum lot size, and greatly restrict new development. So either way, it is nearly impossible to build. With unrestricted supply, the cost of housing would be no greater than the marginal cost of building a new apartment tower. But because of the supply restriction, any house within 30 miles of Boston costs far, far more.
    - Retric 17y ago
      The marginal cost of building a new apartment tower needs to include the cost of increased public services or you end up with perverse incentives.
      - bokonist 17y ago
        Very true. Of course, the cost of building public infrastructure has also dramatically increased due to the various unions of government workers.
  - michaelbuckbee 17y ago
    There are different municipal incentives at work in a large urban center than in a suburban environment. In the suburbs there is a definite bias towards larger detached homes that cost more money as it increases the tax base while only slightly increasing the per capita costs (for water + sewer + roads, etc).
  - natrius 17y ago
    Every city with wide swaths of land with restricted density has an oversupply of detached housing, which lowers prices relative to the alternatives, but increases prices across the board due to the overall reduction in available units. Reducing restrictions on density allows developers to build what they think people will buy, and people can choose the price they're willing to pay for it. If anything, the gap between condo and house prices in Vancouver is evidence that zoning in other cities is raising prices. Vancouverites clearly prefer to trade detached housing for a better location, and cities that prevent people from making that choice are doing their citizens a disservice by making any given location more expensive to live in. If Vancouver had zoning similar to Sun Belt cities, people under 40 would buy more detached houses, but they would be in the suburbs. Housing in those suburbs would be more expensive than it would be in current suburbs if there wasn't an urban growth boundary.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      > "people under 40 would buy more detached houses, but they would be in the suburbs." The trick with Vancouver is that it's completely boxed in, and almost all land is spoken for already. Pacific ocean on the west, mountains to the north, mountains to the east, and the US border to the south. There's not a lot of land to sprawl into, especially if the province wants to retain agricultural output. Far-away suburbs like Surrey have already seen skyrocketing housing prices, and developers are trying to convert as much farmland as possible, but the reality is that Vancouver simply doesn't have the luxury of sprawling outwards. I'm not particularly sad about this fact (I just can't get behind suburban models of cities), but it does contribute to the ridiculous housing prices.
      - natrius 17y ago
        Ah, I didn't realize that. My point was that in the absence of boundaries, suburban detached housing will be cheaper without zoning that restricts density to an artificially low level.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    Vancouverite here - the city has infamous height restrictions as well as maximum density bylaws in zoning. The downtown core would be an even denser maze of skyscrapers if it weren't for these laws, and IMHO they do contribute to the sky-high housing prices. Vancouver's transit was essentially in standstill since the 80s until very recently, and "reasonably accessible to downtown" land was already all spoken for. Couple this with onerous zoning restrictions and you see why stuff got expensive real fast; the influx of rich immigrant housing speculators really didn't help either. The city's overdue for a major reckoning of housing prices, and I for one will be happy to see it. It is ludicrous for housing to be 10x income.
  - imack 17y ago
    While the fact that more people want to live in Vancouver than there are houses in Vancouver contributes to the cost, the city does place a premium on views of the north short mountains and it being a livable city to the detriment of increasing supply: http://bit.ly/cEBUTG http://bit.ly/cEBUTG (CBC NEWS article, "Vancouver rejects downtown high-rise proposals") While the 10x median stats has many causes, one cannot discount the zoning element as being trivial. I imagine one can find similar practices in most major north american cities.
  - fnid2 17y ago
    Vancouver is an exception because there isn't much land. They are choosing, as a city, to build up, not out. There are only a few roads out and if you've been stuck in the traffic on the 1 just outside the city, then you know it isn't convenient to live far from downtown. Commuting isn't fun and Vancouver has almost the best weather in Canada, definitely the best for a major city not on an island. Even more, the hongkongese loved vancouver and chose it over many of the other options for post brit rule. And I know some < 40er's with detached homes, so I suspect your hyperbole is a bit extreme and indicates a lack of real effort to communicate honestly or a lack of real understanding of the situation in vancouver.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      I'm from Vancouver, my folks own a detached home there... and the previous poster isn't entirely incorrect in his statements on Vancouver housing. The speculative bubble started in the mid 90s, and housing has been rising ever since. It was still within reach of middle class folk all the way up till, oh, about 1997-98 or so. The announcement of the Olympics drove prices even higher, so that's where we're at today. My folks bought in about 15 years ago, and even then our modest 2-story cost about $300K. It is worth $800K now, and our neighbourhood is not even one of the explosive-growth neighbourhoods. Heck, we're not even in Vancouver proper. Buying a detached home in Vancouver city itself is, to put it strongly, impossible for anyone who only has a day job as income. Tiny single-floor bungalows are priced into the $700K's, it's just all so absurd.
mattmcknight 17y ago
The other factors that have changed are the tax exclusion on mortgage interest and capital gains from home sales and interest rate manipulation. The mortgage interest exclusion eventually led people to devise and ask for "piggyback" loans instead of paying for private mortgage insurance, which was not tax deductible. The capital gains exclusion on housing sales up to $500,000 led people to overvalue homes as investment assets, since they had less tax drag than other investments. Interest rate manipulation lowered the real monthly cash outlay for payments, which drove up the actual home prices. It also increased the risk for banks, because they were accepting a lower risk premium on volatile collateral. Nowhere else in the economy do we so explicitly support ordinary folks to make highly leveraged investments. When housing price volatility increased, the down payment requirements should have gone up as the risk premium increased. Instead, our government conspired and is still conspiring to drive them down, backed with our tax dollars buying the loans and now buying up the MBS.
old-gregg 17y ago
People choose to live in more expensive homes I didn't choose anything for my rent to skyrocket because suddenly I live in a million dollar 1-br. Everybody has to live somewhere. And by speculatively inflating the cost of housing (and getting out of it before the burst) a speculator effectively strips general public of their cash. You don't have a choice: unless you live on the street, you're participating in this game and you're getting screwed even if you rent. Imagine this: assume I have many billions of hypothetical dollars to play with. I go and buy a lot of houses and rent them out. Then I start giving out loans with 50yr/0% APR to everybody. Guess what happens to the houses I already own? Their value will skyrocket. So I can sell my loans to the next guy (who's hoping to re-sell them as well, since prices are going up) and I sell my expensive real estate too. When everything goes to hell, everybody will be poorer but me, including poor souls who's been paying insane rents and refused to invest in the bubble. So yes, we have a problem because the system allows this to happen.
- jseliger 17y ago
  A single person as an individual doesn't choose to live in more expensive houses necessarily, but we as a society do: take a look at the graph attached to Virginia Postrel's "A Tale of Two Houses:" http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing . Notice how much it costs to build in many of America's most expensive cities. If you take a desirable, urban place to live and slap extensive controls on building height and the like, you get expensive housing. Much of our housing problem is self-made. This has been chronicled extensively by urban planners, economists, and on blogs like The Bellows: http://www.ryanavent.com/blog http://www.ryanavent.com/blog . But relatively few people trace the cost of houses back to the fundamental issue of land controls.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  you're ignoring the risk involved in loaning money. government effectively removed this risk for the lending institutions. therefore, moral hazard.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  We have a problem because we allow this to happen. The system doesn't exist as an independent entity. The system, however constituted, is a reflection upon those upon whom it operates. We choose what we allow to fly, and our generations are stuck with the responsibility, however you slice it. For instance, people could look at a 50yr/0% loan and say, "There's no way I am going to wager on something for 50 years, that is crazy, also 0% APR means a tricky, tricky bank". Instead, we eat that kind of stuff up, because all we think about is getting what we want and getting it now. People are too excited to think ahead. Same goes for government. You can wax on about corruption in politics all the day long, but as long as you're propping up the same institutions by electing the same incumbents or their alter-egos in the two main parties or patronizing major media corporations, you're a part of the cause. If the people were unwilling to accept corruption, there wouldn't be any. The solution is to change the system by the individual action and perspective that will diminish the entrenched badness, and to spread these philosophies among friends. Alteration by artifice as government intervention is not effective -- whatever laws you pass, the same practices will resurface in new robes because the population can still be exploited. The population will remain exploitable until they change their conceptions and actions, no matter what you do with the government. The reaction to the housing crisis is a dog and pony show meant to appease populist fervor without causing significant disruption in "business as usual" for either the consumer or its providers. It has done no good, and it could not have done any good. We need an ideological shift, not band-aids, talking points, or press releases.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
/s/because they chose homes they couldn't afford/because the banks approved mortgages they couldn't afford/
Dbug 17y ago
At the national median price you'd be lucky to get a mobile home on a very tiny lot where I live in California. And a condominium is even more. I know elderly people with single family homes that are paid for, but the valuation is so high, that if their property taxes were based on current value, they'd take their entire social security or disability income. These are people that worked and saved all of their lives. Some low wage earners are forced to share apartments to avoid being homeless. Working full time at minimum wage is getting to where it isn't enough even for rent. Conservatives complain about businesses covering any part of health care cost. Look at an area like Santa Barbara and you'll find businesses having trouble getting low-wage employees because they can't afford to live in the area? Are they expected to live a dozen people to a house?
DaniFong 17y ago
The price of the same good (livable land amongst interesting opportunities and people) increased rapidly as the supply of money increased. What's worse is that the supply of money increased primarily for those people who wanted to blow it on a home spending bonanza. Now that the supply of money has dwindled, there's hardly any left in desirable areas at affordable prices for people who are not rich. Suppose I wanted to buy land to build my own home, starting from a tent, in the bay area. Where would I go?
earl 17y ago
Wow, your post demonstrates incompetence. #1 -- median home prices have shot up. That includes homes without {stainless steel appliances, marble counters, and whatever else it is you think people shouldn't be consuming} #2 -- people didn't just choose homes they couldn't afford. Banks gave people loans they had no hope of repaying. Bankers lied on applications to get their clients larger mortgages. Appraisers inflated valuations. Credit agencies accepted bribes to allow banks to syndicate loans. Government, in this case mostly Republicans, looked the other way as housing advocates begged for intervention. Your natural order is characteristic of your utter lack of knowledge. Banks didn't hold the vast majority of mortgages, so they got paid either way. The government was not at fault for guaranteeing loans -- try actually learning something about the situation. Fannie / Freddie loans plummeted as a share of the market and performed, and continue to perform, far better than mortgages originated elsewhere. The government (/we/nation) is involved in the housing market -- and this is complicated -- because PEOPLE NEED A PLACE TO LIVE. So while I agree that government probably oughtn't be involved in, say, video game production, they should be involved in {housing, food, medicine, education} -- basically life's necessities. I'm sorry for being blunt, but perhaps you could try educating yourself just a tiny bit before forming and sharing nonsensical opinions.
- earl 17y ago
  Also, if you want to actually understand what happened in the housing market, go read calculated risk calculatedrisk.blogspot.com esp anything by Tanta

bokonist 17y ago

If you break out the numbers further, it's land prices that have been responsible for the housing price increases, not the cost of construction. The main culprits are zoning laws. It's simply not possible to build duplexes or more densely packed homes in most suburbs, and so all the land gets spoken for and no more housing can get built.

cperciva 17y ago
The main culprit are zoning laws. I disagree. The Vancouver area is one of the most expensive in the world for detached house (median house price > 10 x median income), but that's not for lack of denser housing options. I don't know anyone under age 40 who has even considered buying a detached house here; the default option is to buy a condo in one of the many towers which are going up, and the expensive "yuppie" option is to get a townhouse. Land is expensive because people want to live close to the city center; not due to excessive zoning restrictions.
- dantheman 17y ago
  But excessive zoning restrictions exacerbate the problem. In Cambridge, MA there are significant limitations on how high buildings can be thus limiting construction of larger apartment buildings. This in turn drives up the cost of housing due to the lack of supply.
- bokonist 17y ago
  In the Boston area, where I live, the central city and inner suburbs have bans on how high a building can go and generally make it extremely difficult to get building permits. I've heard it takes up to 10 years and millions in lawyer fees to get a permit to build a new apartment tower. The mid to outer suburbs have strict laws against duplexes, have minimum lot size, and greatly restrict new development. So either way, it is nearly impossible to build. With unrestricted supply, the cost of housing would be no greater than the marginal cost of building a new apartment tower. But because of the supply restriction, any house within 30 miles of Boston costs far, far more.
  - Retric 17y ago
    The marginal cost of building a new apartment tower needs to include the cost of increased public services or you end up with perverse incentives.
    - bokonist 17y ago
      Very true. Of course, the cost of building public infrastructure has also dramatically increased due to the various unions of government workers.
- michaelbuckbee 17y ago
  There are different municipal incentives at work in a large urban center than in a suburban environment. In the suburbs there is a definite bias towards larger detached homes that cost more money as it increases the tax base while only slightly increasing the per capita costs (for water + sewer + roads, etc).
- natrius 17y ago
  Every city with wide swaths of land with restricted density has an oversupply of detached housing, which lowers prices relative to the alternatives, but increases prices across the board due to the overall reduction in available units. Reducing restrictions on density allows developers to build what they think people will buy, and people can choose the price they're willing to pay for it. If anything, the gap between condo and house prices in Vancouver is evidence that zoning in other cities is raising prices. Vancouverites clearly prefer to trade detached housing for a better location, and cities that prevent people from making that choice are doing their citizens a disservice by making any given location more expensive to live in. If Vancouver had zoning similar to Sun Belt cities, people under 40 would buy more detached houses, but they would be in the suburbs. Housing in those suburbs would be more expensive than it would be in current suburbs if there wasn't an urban growth boundary.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    > "people under 40 would buy more detached houses, but they would be in the suburbs." The trick with Vancouver is that it's completely boxed in, and almost all land is spoken for already. Pacific ocean on the west, mountains to the north, mountains to the east, and the US border to the south. There's not a lot of land to sprawl into, especially if the province wants to retain agricultural output. Far-away suburbs like Surrey have already seen skyrocketing housing prices, and developers are trying to convert as much farmland as possible, but the reality is that Vancouver simply doesn't have the luxury of sprawling outwards. I'm not particularly sad about this fact (I just can't get behind suburban models of cities), but it does contribute to the ridiculous housing prices.
    - natrius 17y ago
      Ah, I didn't realize that. My point was that in the absence of boundaries, suburban detached housing will be cheaper without zoning that restricts density to an artificially low level.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  Vancouverite here - the city has infamous height restrictions as well as maximum density bylaws in zoning. The downtown core would be an even denser maze of skyscrapers if it weren't for these laws, and IMHO they do contribute to the sky-high housing prices. Vancouver's transit was essentially in standstill since the 80s until very recently, and "reasonably accessible to downtown" land was already all spoken for. Couple this with onerous zoning restrictions and you see why stuff got expensive real fast; the influx of rich immigrant housing speculators really didn't help either. The city's overdue for a major reckoning of housing prices, and I for one will be happy to see it. It is ludicrous for housing to be 10x income.
- imack 17y ago
  While the fact that more people want to live in Vancouver than there are houses in Vancouver contributes to the cost, the city does place a premium on views of the north short mountains and it being a livable city to the detriment of increasing supply: http://bit.ly/cEBUTG http://bit.ly/cEBUTG (CBC NEWS article, "Vancouver rejects downtown high-rise proposals") While the 10x median stats has many causes, one cannot discount the zoning element as being trivial. I imagine one can find similar practices in most major north american cities.
- fnid2 17y ago
  Vancouver is an exception because there isn't much land. They are choosing, as a city, to build up, not out. There are only a few roads out and if you've been stuck in the traffic on the 1 just outside the city, then you know it isn't convenient to live far from downtown. Commuting isn't fun and Vancouver has almost the best weather in Canada, definitely the best for a major city not on an island. Even more, the hongkongese loved vancouver and chose it over many of the other options for post brit rule. And I know some < 40er's with detached homes, so I suspect your hyperbole is a bit extreme and indicates a lack of real effort to communicate honestly or a lack of real understanding of the situation in vancouver.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    I'm from Vancouver, my folks own a detached home there... and the previous poster isn't entirely incorrect in his statements on Vancouver housing. The speculative bubble started in the mid 90s, and housing has been rising ever since. It was still within reach of middle class folk all the way up till, oh, about 1997-98 or so. The announcement of the Olympics drove prices even higher, so that's where we're at today. My folks bought in about 15 years ago, and even then our modest 2-story cost about $300K. It is worth $800K now, and our neighbourhood is not even one of the explosive-growth neighbourhoods. Heck, we're not even in Vancouver proper. Buying a detached home in Vancouver city itself is, to put it strongly, impossible for anyone who only has a day job as income. Tiny single-floor bungalows are priced into the $700K's, it's just all so absurd.

mattmcknight 17y ago

The other factors that have changed are the tax exclusion on mortgage interest and capital gains from home sales and interest rate manipulation. The mortgage interest exclusion eventually led people to devise and ask for "piggyback" loans instead of paying for private mortgage insurance, which was not tax deductible. The capital gains exclusion on housing sales up to $500,000 led people to overvalue homes as investment assets, since they had less tax drag than other investments. Interest rate manipulation lowered the real monthly cash outlay for payments, which drove up the actual home prices. It also increased the risk for banks, because they were accepting a lower risk premium on volatile collateral. Nowhere else in the economy do we so explicitly support ordinary folks to make highly leveraged investments. When housing price volatility increased, the down payment requirements should have gone up as the risk premium increased. Instead, our government conspired and is still conspiring to drive them down, backed with our tax dollars buying the loans and now buying up the MBS.

old-gregg 17y ago

People choose to live in more expensive homes I didn't choose anything for my rent to skyrocket because suddenly I live in a million dollar 1-br. Everybody has to live somewhere. And by speculatively inflating the cost of housing (and getting out of it before the burst) a speculator effectively strips general public of their cash. You don't have a choice: unless you live on the street, you're participating in this game and you're getting screwed even if you rent. Imagine this: assume I have many billions of hypothetical dollars to play with. I go and buy a lot of houses and rent them out. Then I start giving out loans with 50yr/0% APR to everybody. Guess what happens to the houses I already own? Their value will skyrocket. So I can sell my loans to the next guy (who's hoping to re-sell them as well, since prices are going up) and I sell my expensive real estate too. When everything goes to hell, everybody will be poorer but me, including poor souls who's been paying insane rents and refused to invest in the bubble. So yes, we have a problem because the system allows this to happen.

jseliger 17y ago
A single person as an individual doesn't choose to live in more expensive houses necessarily, but we as a society do: take a look at the graph attached to Virginia Postrel's "A Tale of Two Houses:" http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing . Notice how much it costs to build in many of America's most expensive cities. If you take a desirable, urban place to live and slap extensive controls on building height and the like, you get expensive housing. Much of our housing problem is self-made. This has been chronicled extensively by urban planners, economists, and on blogs like The Bellows: http://www.ryanavent.com/blog http://www.ryanavent.com/blog . But relatively few people trace the cost of houses back to the fundamental issue of land controls.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
you're ignoring the risk involved in loaning money. government effectively removed this risk for the lending institutions. therefore, moral hazard.
cookiecaper 17y ago
We have a problem because we allow this to happen. The system doesn't exist as an independent entity. The system, however constituted, is a reflection upon those upon whom it operates. We choose what we allow to fly, and our generations are stuck with the responsibility, however you slice it. For instance, people could look at a 50yr/0% loan and say, "There's no way I am going to wager on something for 50 years, that is crazy, also 0% APR means a tricky, tricky bank". Instead, we eat that kind of stuff up, because all we think about is getting what we want and getting it now. People are too excited to think ahead. Same goes for government. You can wax on about corruption in politics all the day long, but as long as you're propping up the same institutions by electing the same incumbents or their alter-egos in the two main parties or patronizing major media corporations, you're a part of the cause. If the people were unwilling to accept corruption, there wouldn't be any. The solution is to change the system by the individual action and perspective that will diminish the entrenched badness, and to spread these philosophies among friends. Alteration by artifice as government intervention is not effective -- whatever laws you pass, the same practices will resurface in new robes because the population can still be exploited. The population will remain exploitable until they change their conceptions and actions, no matter what you do with the government. The reaction to the housing crisis is a dog and pony show meant to appease populist fervor without causing significant disruption in "business as usual" for either the consumer or its providers. It has done no good, and it could not have done any good. We need an ideological shift, not band-aids, talking points, or press releases.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

/s/because they chose homes they couldn't afford/because the banks approved mortgages they couldn't afford/

Dbug 17y ago

At the national median price you'd be lucky to get a mobile home on a very tiny lot where I live in California. And a condominium is even more. I know elderly people with single family homes that are paid for, but the valuation is so high, that if their property taxes were based on current value, they'd take their entire social security or disability income. These are people that worked and saved all of their lives. Some low wage earners are forced to share apartments to avoid being homeless. Working full time at minimum wage is getting to where it isn't enough even for rent. Conservatives complain about businesses covering any part of health care cost. Look at an area like Santa Barbara and you'll find businesses having trouble getting low-wage employees because they can't afford to live in the area? Are they expected to live a dozen people to a house?

DaniFong 17y ago

The price of the same good (livable land amongst interesting opportunities and people) increased rapidly as the supply of money increased. What's worse is that the supply of money increased primarily for those people who wanted to blow it on a home spending bonanza. Now that the supply of money has dwindled, there's hardly any left in desirable areas at affordable prices for people who are not rich. Suppose I wanted to buy land to build my own home, starting from a tent, in the bay area. Where would I go?

earl 17y ago

Wow, your post demonstrates incompetence. #1 -- median home prices have shot up. That includes homes without {stainless steel appliances, marble counters, and whatever else it is you think people shouldn't be consuming} #2 -- people didn't just choose homes they couldn't afford. Banks gave people loans they had no hope of repaying. Bankers lied on applications to get their clients larger mortgages. Appraisers inflated valuations. Credit agencies accepted bribes to allow banks to syndicate loans. Government, in this case mostly Republicans, looked the other way as housing advocates begged for intervention. Your natural order is characteristic of your utter lack of knowledge. Banks didn't hold the vast majority of mortgages, so they got paid either way. The government was not at fault for guaranteeing loans -- try actually learning something about the situation. Fannie / Freddie loans plummeted as a share of the market and performed, and continue to perform, far better than mortgages originated elsewhere. The government (/we/nation) is involved in the housing market -- and this is complicated -- because PEOPLE NEED A PLACE TO LIVE. So while I agree that government probably oughtn't be involved in, say, video game production, they should be involved in {housing, food, medicine, education} -- basically life's necessities. I'm sorry for being blunt, but perhaps you could try educating yourself just a tiny bit before forming and sharing nonsensical opinions.

earl 17y ago
Also, if you want to actually understand what happened in the housing market, go read calculated risk calculatedrisk.blogspot.com esp anything by Tanta