San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

I read yesterday the official California Unemployment rate = 10.1%.

Which means it's probably more like 15%.

A jump of one full percentage point in one month is huge. Investors and potential homebuyers waiting on the sidelines to buy at the bottom would do well to consider other states.
CA now has a rapidly deteriorating private economy combined with a fiscal crisis that shows every sign of climaxing soon with some combination of tax hikes and service cutbacks. Our anti-business, soak-the-rich Democrat-controlled legislature will succeed in driving entrepreneurs and the middle class to friendlier climes.
For real estate investors, demographic trends should be uppermost on their minds. We continue to lose our most productive citizens, and attract the least productive. I'd invest in any other state west of the Mississippi before I'd chose CA.

Econ:

If you could relocate, what State would you go to and why? I agree with you the soak the business class clowns, libs and other feebs in the legislature are buying votes at the expense of the real workers and tax payers. If it was not for the climate, most of us would leave.

Any university town in MT, ID, OR, or WA.
Great outdoor activities, cosmopolitan atmosphere, and plenty of liberal professors to argue with.

Dunno EconProf, pretty soon the word "economist" will sound worse than "liberal" or "used car salesman." I don't think it will be much better in MT or ID.

Josh

Preaching to the choir on this one. All the data I've seen on RE prices in CA since 1960 gives unemployment the number one indicator of price direction. Anything over 7% means RE prices are headed down. Well, 9.3% and we're only at the first year of a nasty contraction. If you think Mr Mortgage is right about the next wave of foreclosures, as I do, then this is a prefect storm for RE prices to really drop in 2009.

Agreed about college towns. Just gotta be able to make a decent living in them.