Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:21:46 PM
In the past, I have gone on here at length about how the housing market is not as bad as it is made out to be, in part because the foreclosed properties all have a hard value that can be translated into money for somebody down the road.
I also said that the biggest problem was that neither political party had the will to take the rest of the people in homes that they can't pay for and put them out. Everybody is waiting for the mortgage holders to do this dirty work, and they want little of it, either.
Well, folks, I was wrong. There is a bigger problem. We live in a country where large parts of the homeowning community do not want to live among renters, and most of the empty or soon to be empty houses are in places where the onwers around them will not tolerate a neighbor with three families and seven cars on one lot. There are a ton of zoning rules and Homeowner Association codicils that expressly forbid this.
There is a movement extant in many gated communities to get these empty houses razed to the ground, even if they have to collaborate to fund this process.
This means that there are houses out there that somebody has put money up to build that are not going to return on the investement soon, or maybe never. THAT is something that may well take years to recover from, and it certainly means that the housing construction industry is in a hell it could never have imagined in the early go-go years of the new millenium.
And until that problem is solved, the housing price recovery will be slow in coming.