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At least the dotcom bubble produced world class companies like Amazon and eBay and Google. The housing bubble leaves us with only foreign debt and unproductive

by ckinnan 18y ago

At least the dotcom bubble produced world class companies like Amazon and eBay and Google. The housing bubble leaves us with only foreign debt and unproductive granite countertops.

nostrademons 18y ago
And lots of houses. I'm guessing some lucky entrepreneur will come up with a good use for all those empty houses, once they've all been foreclosed upon and prices have adjusted to reality. I had an idea last year that I'd act upon if I had a spare $50M or so lying around: mixed-use coworking/residential spaces for young professionals. The increasing mobility of the professional class means that more and more people aren't tied down to a central office. Why not create intentional communities out of abandoned subdivisions, where young professionals could live and work with other young people? I'd pay a premium for being able to roll out of bed and walk to work, yet I don't like the brick & concrete of dense city neighborhoods. Park a couple ZipCars in the development, and you solve their transportation/shopping needs as well.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I live in an apartment building built in 2006 or so. The heating system is undersized and uses the same hot water as the shower -- if you want a non-frigid shower, you have to remember to turn the heat off first and turn it back on afterwards. The doors don't fit quite right. Every single screen in every window is undersized by 2 inches in one dimension. It's also really drafty, which may explain why the original builder is replacing every single window in the 300+-unit complex. (One wonders if a lawsuit happened somewhere in there. Unfortunately, they did not get around to replacing our windows before winter set in, and did I mention that it was drafty? I need to get over to the hardware store to buy plastic wrap for the windows. To think that I dreamed of never having to do that again when we moved out of the 1920s-era house...) My favorite feature is the built-in wine rack, which adds class to the establishment until you try to fit a wine bottle in it. Which is physically impossible, because it was misinstalled. But I still feel lucky compared to my sister, who moved into a similar complex in the Midwest where the builder had failed to build the exterior porches with the proper slope, leading rainwater to collect against the walls at the inner edge of the porches, leading to failure of the siding, water leakage, and the exciting possibility of... total porch structural failure. Fortunately, my sister moved out in less than a year. These little incidents make me worry that a lot of those leftover houses will be slums. They were built terribly, in terribly planned neighborhoods, by people with little past experience and even less future in the construction field. What profit was there in building the houses to last? Nobody was planning to live in them for very long. They're just tokens, built with less care than a poker chip. They were built to flip.

by ckinnan 18y ago

At least the dotcom bubble produced world class companies like Amazon and eBay and Google. The housing bubble leaves us with only foreign debt and unproductive granite countertops.

nostrademons 18y ago

And lots of houses. I'm guessing some lucky entrepreneur will come up with a good use for all those empty houses, once they've all been foreclosed upon and prices have adjusted to reality. I had an idea last year that I'd act upon if I had a spare $50M or so lying around: mixed-use coworking/residential spaces for young professionals. The increasing mobility of the professional class means that more and more people aren't tied down to a central office. Why not create intentional communities out of abandoned subdivisions, where young professionals could live and work with other young people? I'd pay a premium for being able to roll out of bed and walk to work, yet I don't like the brick & concrete of dense city neighborhoods. Park a couple ZipCars in the development, and you solve their transportation/shopping needs as well.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
I live in an apartment building built in 2006 or so. The heating system is undersized and uses the same hot water as the shower -- if you want a non-frigid shower, you have to remember to turn the heat off first and turn it back on afterwards. The doors don't fit quite right. Every single screen in every window is undersized by 2 inches in one dimension. It's also really drafty, which may explain why the original builder is replacing every single window in the 300+-unit complex. (One wonders if a lawsuit happened somewhere in there. Unfortunately, they did not get around to replacing our windows before winter set in, and did I mention that it was drafty? I need to get over to the hardware store to buy plastic wrap for the windows. To think that I dreamed of never having to do that again when we moved out of the 1920s-era house...) My favorite feature is the built-in wine rack, which adds class to the establishment until you try to fit a wine bottle in it. Which is physically impossible, because it was misinstalled. But I still feel lucky compared to my sister, who moved into a similar complex in the Midwest where the builder had failed to build the exterior porches with the proper slope, leading rainwater to collect against the walls at the inner edge of the porches, leading to failure of the siding, water leakage, and the exciting possibility of... total porch structural failure. Fortunately, my sister moved out in less than a year. These little incidents make me worry that a lot of those leftover houses will be slums. They were built terribly, in terribly planned neighborhoods, by people with little past experience and even less future in the construction field. What profit was there in building the houses to last? Nobody was planning to live in them for very long. They're just tokens, built with less care than a poker chip. They were built to flip.