It's Not a Housing Boom. It's a Land Grab.

[Iwillnevergiveup]

http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/05/the_dangerous_new_housing_boom.html

##snip##

"Generally, housing recoveries are fueled by millions of Americans with new jobs, higher wages, available credit from banks and overall confidence that things will get better. But the real economy that most people live in day-to-day is too weak for all of that. Jobs are in short supply, wages are at historic lows and credit for middle and working class Americans is tight. With their economic ladder into homeownership taken away, many Americans can no longer participate in the housing market.

In their absence, financial firms and rich global jetsetters are snapping up hundreds of millions of dollars of property each week."

##snip##

[FirstLight]

1. the headline says it all

....I guess between this and the "market boom" we are right on track for another bubble burst soon, and this time there will be no 'jobless recovery' to make....

[djean111]

2. Wall Street has been snapping up houses in my sleepy and quiet little subdivision

of about 1200 homes. I have received several letters (I have mentioned this elsewhere) asking to buy my house for cash, bragging about ties to Bain capital, and boasting that they are squeezing out first-timers.
My HOA dues are $15 a year, the board is all volunteer, we have no problems. We all pay another $50 a year for county services with our real estate taxes.
All of a sudden, new owners are asking us to let them appoint a paid fucking board of directors, a Community Development District (CDD)"so as to keep our neighborhood beautiful". We have one little park that the county maintains. No pool, no golf course. We pay in enough to maintain the entrances and put up Christmas lights. We don't want anything more.

No, they want to raise the dues until some cannot pay and sell their houses or lose them to the HOA (HOA's can put liens on houses and take possession of them if the fees are not paid). They want to turn the neighborhood into a big rental neighborhood.
Unless I get a LOT more than my home is worth, I cannot afford to buy elsewhere.
State-created CDD's have gotten greedy - charging homeowners in another subdivision $15 a month extra for a website. A stupid little website. And worse. The website homeowners successfully sued, but that is expensive and time-consuming.
Usually, the CDD is appointed for new subdivisions. There is no need for one in my seventeen-year-old subdivision, except to rake in money and start requiring things like sprinklers and sod.
Fuck.

[KT2000]

4. Wow!

I hope the other residents are not going to fall for this.

[djean111]

9. We are voting. Voting ends June 13.

This is Florida - I have no faith in counting the votes.
Oh, and this subdivision is actually 27 years old, I misspoke - there is absolutely no need for a CDD at all - there is no undeveloped land, the roads around it have been built, we have no amenities except a county-maintained park. If someone's yard is a mess or they are breaking one of the very few HOA rules, we can call the county and they send a guy out to handle it. This is a power and money grab.
There is so much money to be made - the example of another community being hit with a $15 a month website fee - 826 homes x $15 = $12,390 a month, $148,680 a year. Just for "administering the website". The freeper admin guy would weep with jealousy.
This is happening all over Florida, and the state legislature is "going to look into it".
Probably to see if they can add some more fees.

[JDPriestly]

10. It's the slumming down of America.

It is generally the case that renters do not maintain their properties as well as homeowners/homebuyers do. Moving Americans from mortgages to leases will trash a lot of neighborhoods.

[ElizabethWarren2016]

19. Nice sticker!

[midnight]

3. K&R

[RobertEarl]

5. George Bush: Home ownership is the future

What he really meant was: the future is he and his buds owning your home.

Real state investors are going big into the rental market. Cheap properties due to foreclosures, and high rents make the numbers work for them.

Housing booms fuel the job markets. Look around you, everything that is nailed down is needed for each new house, and nailers to nail it all together.

Everyone needs housing, and houses fall apart day by day. What happened was that we had a housing bubble that created excess housing. That and people are moving in together makes for an over abundance. It will even out as more houses are bull dozed. That may take awhile.

[truedelphi]

11. I am trying to figure out where in the world you' re coming from??

We did not have a housing bubble that created excess housing. We had a housing bubble that convinced millions of people that they could trade up a bit,and go from being renters to home owners. And had it not been for the fact that "our government" from the President on down, (regardless if it is Bush or Obama) and including 90% of the dickwads in Congress, are owned by the likes of CitiBank, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, et al, and so these puppets submitted the nation to the new and perpetual notion of "Too Big To Fail, And Too Big To Jail."

In Iceland the people who brought havoc upon the people of Iceland ended up in prison jump suits. Here in the USA, those who created this bubble are still financially calling the shots, while 90% of us watch most people 's lives devolve into little more than slavery.

[RobertEarl]

12. We had a housing bubble

That is why so many houses are vacant today.

Sure, the bankers fueled it. And made money doing so. Your buddy Obama said they didn't do anything illegal, so there they sit behind a desk.

Now that the bubble burst, millions of jobs nailing stuff down, and millions of jobs making the stuff to be nailed down are now un-needed. And will be until many new houses are built. So there are less people who can afford to buy houses and housing prices collapsed. But many sit vacant. There is an over abundance of houses on the market.

[truedelphi]

17. Here is where you are wrong. Yes, yes, we

had a housing bubble. But it was not that bubble that brought down the economy. What brought down the economy (and maybe you were not around in fall 2008 and all of 2009 when this was explained here on DU?) was not at all the many people who bought homes that "they could not afford." Instead, what brought down the economy was the circa 1999-2000 Banking Reform and Modernization Act, signed off on By Bill Clinton (For which he went on to collect some $ 100K every time he stepped in front of a corproate podium and gave a speech.) that one "banking reform" act brought the end of Glass Steagal. Period

Then the American public found out that banks were now allowed to be insurers and gamblers. Next, from the end of the dot com implosion to basically summer 2006, we witnessed as the CDO's and other exotic investments now legalized by the "banking Reform" act let "bankers" chop mortgages up and dice and splice and sell these groups of chopped up mortgages as investments. Those gambles were what cost us the economy.

Sorry if you weren't around when the likes of Octafish and autorank explained all this.

BTW, the fact that the Federal Reserve could hand out some 15 to 16 TRILLIONS of dollars to offset the bruises felt by the Big Financial/Wall Street "Community" means that Bernanke could have acted differently, had he a conscience. Instead of satisfying his friends and buddies on Wall Street, he could have simply paid off everyone's mortgage. The entire amount of housing that collapsed was well under that fifteen and sixteen trillions of bucks. And the thing is, when you help out the middle and lower classes, the money offered them goes into the local economy. When you help out the Big Bankers, bu offering them lots of money, you end up watching as (And I am not making this up!) Goldman Sachs goes off and purchases a nature preserve in Patagonia, South America.

Oh, yes I am sure you will tell me that those trillions were loans. But funny thing, the experts tell us that some 4.7 trillions of those "loan monies" will never ever be repaid. But what will ahppen ins that the 2.1 trillion dollar Social Security Fund, with its surplus, will be raided, and pay off a lot of this indebtedness.

[RobertEarl]

18. You agree

We had a housing bubble. All those expedited loans went into building a massive amount of housing. It bubbled the economy because the housing bubble made for millions of jobs.

The bubble was bound to burst and when it did the economy fell.

The bankers saw it coming. I saw it coming. Most of America was blinded by the 'good times'. The bankers got away with a bunch of money. And Obama allowed it.

I should have been a banker. I knew it when I was a kid, but wearing a suit was not my style. I was in real estate for awhile, so the whole thing was something I foresaw. Like when Clinton signed away Glass-Steagall.

[truedelphi]

21. Again, the economy fell to the basement (and for the middle and lower clases it fell

Down below the basement) because of the many bets and gambles the "Investment Community" made.

If I sell you six houses you can't afford, that loss to you when the bubble breaks is X amount. But if I am also betting 10,000 times at 100 casinos that you' re going to pay off those mortgages, that gamble is far more hideous than your loss on the homes. That gamble, and the Executive Branch, the Federal Reserve and Congress sanctioning that gamble, is what destroyed the middle class for all time.

The housing bubble crash should not have affected the economy in the manner that it did. In fact, both Issa and Kucinich, who headed up the House Committee on Oversight and Financial Reform tried to get the elected puppets to listen to them and resolve the housing bubble crash by
1) doing exactly as was done during the Savings and Loan crisis. In fact, those laws were still on the books
2) not allow the Federal Reserve to go bonkers in handing out loans to the people in Wall Street.

During the Savings and Loan crisis, the government at the Federal level ordered that each state charter individual banks, and then "bailout" monies were provided to those individual banks. Regulations existed that those monies had to be handed out to businesses in the local community, to help make them whole. Although there was economic suffering, there was nothing like the current situation.

I don't know if you know this, but because of what has transpired by the Federal puppets in their efforts to "bailout" Wall Street, and banks across the globe, right now 49 cents out of every dollar of profit goes directly into the coffers of the Biggest Financial concerns. Back in the seventies and eighties, only 89 cents out of every dollar of profit went to Banks.

BTW, Obama's good buddy Tim Geithner fought Issa/Kucinich efforts from happening tooth and nail. he also saw to it that there were No regulations involving how banks had to help communities. And he lied to Congress about the possibility of this happening.

[LibDemAlways]

6. There was an article this week in the local paper about

ordinary buyers unable to close deals on affordable fixer houses because of rich "flippers" coming in with cash, making cosmetic repairs, and turning them over for a quick profit. Once again the little guy is getting screwed.

[AzDar]

7. K & R

[tofuandbeer]

8. That's a depressing title, and something I had not thought of.

[undergroundpanther]

13. And soon

Most of everything will be owned by some rich piece of shit,and there will be nowhere to exist because 'private property' will be everywhere,and if you can't afford it..well...you aren't the owner class you'll be the owned class,that's what these rich assholes want.

Private property is a lie.

[Fire Walk With Me]

14. Housing is the main asset of the bottom 80% of Americans. Take this away...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022931204#post78

[bvar22]

15. All according to plan, my pretties.

All according to plan.


[font size=3]These things do NOT happen by accident.
They require careful planning and preparation![/font]



You will know them by their WORKS.

[Egalitarian Thug]

16. This is the cycle. They've done it before and they're doing it again, and still the flock

doesn't ever catch on.

[delrem]

20. "Land Grab" has always been the game.