And I appologize if I called your & Chris’s neighborhood “hoity toity”, afterall I am just a bitter renter. I personally think this is the best area of SD (I grew up in Escondido, so I know how less-desirable a lot areas can be…) The schools here flat out rock! I kind of feel like I’m just pretending though because as your data points out, the decline will not likely hit this area as hard, and I probably can’t even afford a condo. I’ve already started trying to sell my wife on the natural beauty of Texas…LOL!
Hipmatt, you said earlier…
“Some have assumed, that buyers in a tight spot will magically “figure out a budget” to allow them to afford ballooning payments. While if this was possible in theory, which it is not…”
I honestly hope your right (well I only sort of do, because this really means trouble for a lot of families which is sad – even if they made the stupid decisions in the first place), but this point of yours kind of speaks to the beginning topic that RottedOak was addressing. You are ASSUMING that these people do not have the ability to make it – no hard evidence to quantify how many & to what degree (because many of them could find a way). For example, maybe a good portion of these troubled borrowers are young families currently operating on a single income. IF (not necessarily when) they can not refi the problem down the road, maybe the non-working spouse can go back to work. I do not have any data to back that up, but I do not think you have evidence of the contrary. Maybe I am reaching a little too far here, but it is so common that posters will throw out a general point or two and then they finish with “it’s really going to get ugly” or whatever as if what they say has proven anything, which in many cases it has not.
