Real Estate bubble bust may be worse than Dot Com bubble bust

if you have at least 1 functioning brain cell, rent don't buy. let the stuff that comes w/ buying be some other shithead's problem.

-- carbon (identitymachine...), July 12th, 2005.

Or, in the case of Jersey City, IN the ghetto. $375,000 for a two-bedroom. Not even near the PATH. One of its selling points is "walking distance from HOBOKEN." !!!???

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA wtf seriously?

so i really don't blame those of you who are totally uninterested.

i guess it's just possible here. you really CAN fuck up here too, but it's possible to buy and it not be totally insane.
m.

It will almost certainly not have a great room, those things kind of skeeve me out.

And we didn't buy on speculation, either. We bought because we are having a third kid and we need the living space.

"Walking Distance To Hoboken" should be a ska song.

it's a good thing that you didn't make this recommendation a few years ago, tombot, seeing as that point there were more ska-bands in the hoboken/jersey city area than there are flies swarming around a freshly-squeezed batch of horse shit.

Does the *shudder* World Inferno/Friendship Society still exist?

apparently

As for hurricanes, we get tons of hurricane effect rain. More yearly inches of rainfall here than Seattle, allegedly.

I'm thankful I live relatively central to Seattle (renting), but I'm already seeing people thinking about this, and prices of central housing has risen dramatically compared to far-and-away suburbs. I just hope there's a motion/design/architecture present at the time to help centralize and expand those suburbs into their own useful cultural hubs, instead of letting them suffocate and becoming wastelands.. and talk about devalued property.

(hmmm, don't know if that makes sense or not.)

Point above being that there are many smart people who think that there is still a lot of money to be made in real estate in the bubble markets. There have been real estate naysayers about this bubble for at least two years, and frankly, there are investors out there who can afford to ride out the bubble even if it bursts.

I might also point out that many people in the 'burbs consider their lifestyles to be full of relevant culture--they see what they do (convenient, quality child rearing, even if it makes for a long commute) as the very definition of their culture. Church, youth soccer, Chuck E. Cheese, and all that shit is their culture. For many of them, it's now multiple-generations deep. Exurbs, suburbs, white flight, whatever--the only reason they even bother associating with the MSA is for the airport, sports teams, and a place of employment.

I might also point out that many people in the 'burbs consider their lifestyles to be full of relevant culture--they see what they do (convenient, quality child rearing, even if it makes for a long commute) as the very definition of their culture

man, do you got that fuckin' right. I never really understood the pejorative context of the insult "breeder" until i got a temp job at a huge suburban mortgage building. The place was filled with mostly middle-class women who primary defining characteristic is spitting out crotch-spawnlings as fast as they can; lots of mothers of varying educational backgrounds and of varying marital status who all had like 3 kids by the time they turned 23.

seriously, it made me realize why much mainstream american pop culture(read: things covered by the E! channel) is how it is. Kids are DEIFIED in our culture, due in part to so many folks having absolutely no identify except in terms of rearing children. These were the folks who'd come home from work, cook dinner, watch American Idol, go to bed, then come into work the next day to discuss the previous night's American Idol all the live-fuckin'-long day. They then would go home, cook dinner, and watch that night's Idol. Repeat for 30+ years.

My buddy had to sit next to them. I hid inside of my clamshell headphones.

also, i should correct myself; that Onion headline above should be something like "Home-Buying Up Among Suburban Lame-o's"

m.

Nothing at all wrong with making $75K, although in figuring ROI you want to make sure you consider all relevant factors (inflation, taxes, tax implications, any improvements, etc.) If you are thorough in figuring out ROI then you can accurate compare it to other possible investment vehicles over the same period in real terms.

That Hissing Sound