Month in review: August
[Previous months in review available here: Jul, Jun, May, Apr, Mar, Feb, Jan-06, Dec-05.]
August is the month for hawking
The month opened with a carryover from July, as we considered the huge building boom about to hit the Big Easy in New New Orleans: start your economic engines: Part 1 and Part 2. Meanwhile, the annual home sales dip that accompanies the dog days of August triggered the usual flurry of sky-is-falling newspaper stories, to which I responded with first a comparison between Ben Bernanke and Wile E. Coyote in Cooling the engine?; a look at
When I met Nancy [whose August birthday I celebrated in Happy birthday, Nancy!], I was living in a rent-controlled apartment, to whose dustiness she took great and understandable exception, and after a couple of years of trying to vacuum away the infinity of dust, she demanded, “You can afford it, why don’t you buy something?” to which I replied, quite happily, “If you find me something to buy, I’ll buy it.” Whereupon the Careful Shopper went on many site visits, finding herself rejecting one after the other because she would never live there, and after one such visit she realized, “If I’m turning down every property for David because I wouldn’t live there, what does that say about my future life?”
On the globe-trotting front, we gave space to Aussie observer Jarrod Gitsham, whose US sojourn led to a very interesting and extensive publication, highlighted in Upside down, looking in: the US from an Australian perspective
Later in the month, I took everyone’s beach-gazing as the jumping-off point for a bi-continental, multi-century excursion into the complexities of shared land use in On the beach: Part 1, the padlock, dealing with a local South Shore spat, raising it to a Federal case in On the beach: Part 2, the Supreme Court, jumping across the Atlantic and back two centuries in On the beach: Part 3, the Enclosure Acts, and returning to the problem of interdependent and overlapping use in On the beach: Part 4, the civitas, where I finished with an exhortation not dissimilar to the Duke of Burgundy’s:
Jan zonder Vrees, a 15th century Duke of Burgundy, as powerful as the King of France.
let it not disgrace me,
If I demand, before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is,
Why that the naked, poor and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Tenure is security, but tenure is no more forever than man is immortal, as we explored in three linked posts: Elderly communities: bringing the mountain, World’s first in-law apartment? and the river of housing:
Our winding cruise through this extended metaphor has thus yielded three housing-market insights:
Housing’s river: three insights
1. Housing consumption is an arc: increasing in young adulthood, decreasing in old age
2. Changing housing means changing homes, a discontinuous portage
3. Each accommodation change calls forth portage specialists.
Life’s journey ends at the River Styx, where we exchange our open vessel for one more permanent.
“I’m from the underworld and I’m here to help you.”
Developments in the rental space were covered in Smarter houses, smarter renters, and Rotten in Elsinore Towers?
The kind of mold that everybody likes.
I stood up for eminent domain in urban redevelopment with a case-study example:
While the foes of eminent domain for economic development (ED4ED) have done an outstanding job of bringing to prominence their poster plaintiffs like Suzette Kelo (and hiding their more questionable ones), eminent domain’s proponents have noticeably failed to personalize their successes, falling back instead on hoary nostrums about responsible government and deliberative process.
As equal time for responsible spokesmen — or at least, spokes-properties! –
“Jane you ignorant slut, eminent domain is always bad.”
… we present the impressive and instructive tale of Phoenix Park in Sacramento, as highlighted in a recent issue of Affordable Housing Finance.
Housing wouldn’t exist without debt finance, and we asked the question if a bank-like object inside a Wal-Mart would be a bank in By any other name, Part 1 and Part 2; and we reviewed a Boston Globe story on fraudulent lending in Bad lenders, bad loans, which post triggered a passionate response from Steve Newberger, principal of the Taunton lending company whose Lawrence office was shut down:
After posting the foregoing, I received an email from Steve Newberger, owner of Diamond Mortgage, with the following comments, which he has given me permission to post:
I thought you might find it fascinating that Fausto Nunez, a person who is in foreclosure detailed in your blog as a victim, did not get his defaulted loan from Diamond Mortgage Services.
He did receive his purchase loan through Diamond Mortgage in December 2003. However, he “astutely” applied for another mortgage loan with a different company about 11 months later, closing on 11/2004. This new loan apparently had him borrowing an additional $27,000 over the balance he had when he purchased the property, too much for him to afford. You can find this new cash-out mortgage listed in the North Essex County Registry Book #9197, Page #318.
I have no idea who the company was that arranged this much larger bad loan for Mr. Nunez, but I can only guess what they wrote down for his income.
Please, before you regurgitate the Boston Globe, please check their facts. I would not bother to tell them they messed up on Mr. Nunez, because based on other erroneous items in their article, I don’t believe they even care.
