I live in one of the communities this article is talking about in Las Vegas. I am 10 minutes from Downtown Las Vegas, and 20 by bus. I wouldn't even call it a

I live in one of the communities this article is talking about in Las Vegas. I am 10 minutes from Downtown Las Vegas, and 20 by bus. I wouldn't even call it a "suburb" like most people think of it, just the normal city of Las Vegas. What the article is really about is how when 3/4 of the houses in my community went up for foreclosure they were all purchased by real estate investors. In my neighborhood these investors were almost 100% Chinese. The person I bought my house from owns 7 houses on my street, and he has never even visited the United States. He is not a great land lord obviously, and the renters who live in these houses don't keep them up and the area is very different than it was before 2008. I think the neighborhood will recover eventually, but people don't realize it will take decades before the owner occupancy rates return to what they were. The investors aren't bad people, but they profited from a bad situation so much that even their investments aren't exactly what they thought they were anymore. The investors thought they were investing in super safe bonds of the "American Dream TM", and now they own a majority of the shares in "New Suburban Ghetto Inc". What they didn't realize is that real estate isn't like another stock you can own anonymously. It's value depends a lot on who owns it. The market can absorb some amount of real estate investors without changing much, but the consequences of crossing a certain threshold will completely change what the investment is.