Special guest post:
View Larger Map
Peripheral Visionary said...
I think it is entirely possible that we will see a return to the ghost towns of yore. Probably not in San Diego or Los Angeles proper, but some of the more remote communities. Densely built cookie-cutter housing that is light years from nowhere, makes absolutely no sense.
What some people do not understand is that the record high vacancy rates in some of the hardest-hit communities are not going to take a long time coming down, they are not coming down, period. Banks renting bulldozers to plow homes under before we are done with all of this.
----
Thanks PV. I can only add that Mrs. Dawg just called from the new facility under her aegis. Lancaster, no... Quartz Hills, much classier. She was marveling over the mile after mile of 4br/2.5ba 2400sf homes spaced 10 feet apart. Most likely both adults are away at work in Los Angeles. These people aren't going to see a dime of appreciation for at least a decade. That is if they stick it out. They just plain aren't going to do that unless we bribe them.
Quartz Hills California we salute you.
25 comments:
First thing is they can't sell themselves out of the predicament
Second thing to post is :
Am I the first to mention the e-mail concerning Goldspring ???
From Goldflake himself !!!
I don't know about the high desert, but in the outer Bay Area suburbs like Tracy, prices have fallen so far that they're about 10% away from it being cheaper to own a house in Tracy and commute than it is to rent an apartment in my lovely Bay area suburb. In fact, if I want to take the train, I already come out ahead economically by making the move, even adding in a generous wage for the extra hour per day commuting.
I don't rememeber where I saw it, but somewhere on the web there are side by side arial shots of Detroit, one in the 30's the next in the 80's or 90's, that show the exact thing PV is talking about. A b&w picture of organized densely backed houses next to a color one of the same neighborhood with large amount of empty spaces between the random remaining houses.
So the gold spot looks pretty much how I thought it would. Hey, I gotta enjoy bragging, it's not like I made a lot of money out of it, just about enough to make a 911 call.
Now all I've got left to look forward to is the printing of the second ever trillion dollar bill. That should just about cover the first installment on the monolines. The scholars amongst us will know Fidel Castro stole the first trillion dollar bill from Montgomery Burns.
Re unsafe places to put your money - there are lots of venture capital sites on the interwebs now. They come with the added bonus of being great entertainment. I won't post links, but it didn't take long before I came across the familiar term "granite countertops".
I think I'm becoming addicted to VC sites. I especially like the people who can't spell the name of their own company correctly.
The VC thing doesn't surprise me. Everybody and their sister has a social media startup right now, and the money has to be coming from somewhere.
In Zimbabwe you could buy a trillion dollar house, billion dollar bed and a million dollar beer
And they print actual billion zimbabwe dollar bills.
Correction - 10 million
wagga,
last line of that 10 million note link:
"In August 2006, the central bank slashed three zeros from the nation's old currency."
So 10 billion in the not so old money...
Densely built cookie-cutter housing that is light years from nowhere, makes absolutely no sense.
Don't you like "new urbanism"? These neighborhoods are "compact and walkable"!
There's a "new urbanist" neighborhood about 2 miles from me. "New urban" is another way to describe cheap sh**ty soon-to-be Section 8 housing on tiny pieces of land.
Best thing to do would be to raise property taxes on properties with people living in them to make up for lost revenue from the vacant houses.
After seeing that map and thinking about the chumps who were stupid enough to put everything into their little piece of America only to lose it.
Or worse, stiffs hanging on by their teeth as they see the streets dying. Most leaving. No one buying. The lawns dying.
Then one day they get the pink slip and lose it.
Remember the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas in the 80s?
I remember feeling for his character, as I as in an industry getting hammered the same way. Thank God the economy picked up right after it was released.
Bottom line: How long until one of the stiffs who did try to do it right but got screwed goes postal?
IMHO it is just a matter of time before it happens in one of those Cat 5 counties.
h.
Go to Zillow.com under "Buyers" discussion forum to see thread re: Casey email posting.
Oh My God! Starbucks will stop serving breakfast sandwiches.
Dawg,
Do you have a prediction as to how much lower will the S&P 500 drop during the upcoming recession? Last time around tech stocks, even those that weren't dot com saw drops close to 30%. What can we expect this time around?
The one advantage the new ghost towns will have over the old urban blight is that at least these homes will look somewhat better after enough of them are thinned out that they don't look jammed in. Not sure how long it will be before that happens, however, and I'd hate to be living in that kind of a neighborhood during the process.
And I was wondering where the e-mail from the failed-real-estate-investor-turned-failed-advice-giver-turned-failed-gold-speculator was, until I checked my Spam folder. Hey, Yahoo Mail got it right for once!
(Although I did enjoy reading through GSPG's financial statements, they were first-class entertainment.)
Hamish,
S&P 500 @1100 by September. (a little over 205 from here). A coupla stair steps this spring and a a grinding summer. Suprising, I think techs will do okay after the next few months of whipsaw. Transports will see some big winners and big losers. I have no idea how to pick each individually. The fun will be home builder deathwatch. After 2-3 just close down with a whimper, no blow ups, i expect a few really stupid bottom fishers to buoy the sector and by late summer they'll be tango uniform too. Just about the time everybody figures out BofA ain't gonna buy Countrywide.
PV,
I actually suggested that a while back. Move people into every other house, bulldoze in between and hand out free copies of "The New Victory Garden." I remember when it was "Crockett's Victory Garden" which makes me either really old (like Jim The Realtor) or a weird kid from New England.
There aren't going to be going many postal moments. This is Pink Floyd time with people hanging on in quiet desperation.
Somebody should tell Countrywide that Snowflake has the $50k he owes them.
Jon Wood - psychopath or coke-fiend?
Anyone willing to put out a buy rating on Countrywide? Would you even want the BoA stock?
Responding to Kenneth's 2:20pm yesterday comment/question, I believe that this link shows the pictures you mentioned:
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=8340
Also, here is an excellent summary of what led to today's situation in Detroit proper--and it actually started back in the 1950s (with RE agents scaring whites into the suburbs with the cry 'the darkies are coming'):
http://www.freep.com/legacy/jobspage/academy/sugrue.htm
There was an excellent multi-part article that the Detroit Free Press did over several weeks which chronicled the decline of one specific block of the inner city over the past five decades--I read it last summer and I'm sure it's still in their archives.
I have an interest in that area since I went to college in Flint (another MI city in decline) at the former General Motors Institute (now Kettering Univ) which was across the Flint River from where the small-block chevy engine was originally built (99% of all of those buildings have been leveled in the past 10-15 years).
Look at it now.
Many thanks of the for links.
The article on minorities and auto jobs in Detroit reminded me of the current situation of the chemical industry.
Pick up any recent issue "Chemical and Engineering News" (the flagship publication for the American Chemical Society" and you will find evidence of two trends: first, the accelerating move of the industry to Asia (and an emerging trend of innovation elsewhere) and secondly, news of some sort of effort to apply affirmative action to what jobs remain.
Looks like some sort of new industrial building in the Northwest part of the new photo. Would like to see a photo in a few years
It could all be just classic Schumpeterian social economics.
Never been to the IE. If this is typical of the housing stock, it's horrendous. There is absolutely no room between those houses.
Post a Comment