"As one mortgage broker I recently spoke with observed, “The whole idea of buying with resale value in mind is gone. All the countertops, the backyards, all those things are meaningless.”"

People are finally buying homes to live in and not for resale.

[Link to Home for Life]

"Right now, there are millions and millions of people who want to “employ” our “unemployed” housing stock: immigrants. Simply let more of them in and they will buy, rent, and live in these empty homes."

Could it be really that simple? Nah! We lack the political will to do it.

[Link to An unemployment problem with an easy solution]

I am prone to write stinging rebukes to poorly written garbage on the web, but when I call someone out, I will devote the post to building a factual argument as to why they are wrong. I never ask anyone to just take my word for it because I am some kind of expert. Authority comes from the presentation of data in a compelling argument. Mindless rants don’t make authors an authority, it makes them lunatics.

[Source: Irvine Housing Blog] IrvineHunter rips apart The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle’s arguments that the 30-year Fixed-Rate Mortgage is to blame for the housing crisis. That’s what I love about blogs. They refute the so-called ignorant pundits with cold hard facts.

The nation’s sprawling suburbs may have been a good place to grow up, but they’re a tough place to grow old. Here’s how towns are beginning to ‘retrofit’ their neighborhoods—and what your community might look like in the future [source].

Interesting on how changing demographics are making retrofitting suburbia almost necessary. However, this could also mean increased focus on developing communities in alternative locations with different characteristics. Housing coming a full circle?

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com is hosting the first ever Reburbia competition: a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs and have just announced the finalists.

via
Journal of Urban Economics (under review)
.

“Neighbors can hear the alarm so they call us, but when we get up to the home, it's vacant, locked up and we're unable to access them,”

Such calls are distracting firefighters from other more important calls in inhabited homes and putting a strain on the public emergency system.

via ABC15 News.

via NPR: Your Odds Of Defaulting.