The sky-high home prices are falling! (Housing boom vs. Doom)

Sorry, this is too much about politics. I will put it in Vonmorganstone. Basically this woman running for city council again this year, Elena Uhing, has said some pretty ridiculous things in support of this development they've approved near my neighborhood.

Actually they ALL did. One of them said something like "well I would have liked to have seen a park go there but that's not the way of the world." This was a quote that this woman thought should go in a NEWSPAPER. Now, wanting a PARK vs. a development that cramms a hundred teeny tiny houses (they look like characatures of houses like the really tall skinny ones in Dr. Seuss pictures) are kind of two really extreme choices. The city doesn't need either ONE. They just need realistic treatment of what should be deliberately added to the community.

Just because no BUILDER (who work for profit the last time I checked) doesn't want to put in a PARK doesn't mean that we need THIS. Residents of Forest Grove want realistic lot sizes, even if they have to pay for them. I know people who just want a half acre or so but can't find that anywhere near town so they have to commute in from the BOONIES to be able to live somewhere just NORMAL.

I said a bunch of stuff at this meeting that ended up being SO RIGHT ON it was actually pretty funny. I told them that I thought that areas on the outskirts of town would start looking more and more unattractive with gas prices going up and they would stop flooding out to cheaper lots because of that. It has happened. I mean in the world post subprime no one is going to want to commute forty minutes to work just to shave ten thousand off of their house.

I actually argued that NO ONE wants to buy these houses to actually live here, that they were just being fueled by real estate speculation. That most of the buyers were just picking up an extra house or two or investing in real estate funds and not actually living here. Those markets, plus a LOT of the actual owner occupied interest is totally dry now. This will leave Forest Grove holding a bag of really undesireable and probably incomplete houses, that will be a plague on nearby neighborhoods.

Add a new MAX line in the mix and you have all kinds of undesireables riding out here to squat in otherwise vacant and unfinished carbon copy homes that no one even checks up on because you have to pay someone to do that and most of the builders are bankrupt and can't do it.