[quote=sdrealtor]I dont get it? So the wealthy enclaves have held up better because those people have more money. So prices have fallen more on the low end. This isnt about how much prices have fallen, I thought this was about affordable housing for families not cheap housing in high end wealthy enclaves for everyone. You are jumping all over the board and making no sense.
You said this was about affordability for families and now you are picking examples from the pockets where the wealthy elite reside.
Again, show me someplace outside of CA where homes in nice areas are not AFFORDABLE to middle and upper middle class families right now.[/quote]
The “wealthy enclaves” have held up better because people have more money to hold on longer than those at the bottom. There is no disagreement there. That is why these areas tend to fall later during RE declines; it does NOT mean that these areas don’t decline or that they don’t decline significantly. They do; they just tend to fall later. I also agree with you that they will generally fall less because there was less distortion in the mid-higher tiers because *the bubble was fed from the bottom-up.* Still, I believe the ratios between low/middle/high tiers that were seen before the hyperbolic moves of the bubble (~2001+) will be restored eventually.
It was because of this time lag that the mid-higher end is seeing fewer declines, relatively speaking. The govt/Fed was able to get in there with their “foreclosure moratoriums” and money-pumping, and various rescues of lenders and borrowers in order to stabilize prices at these unsustainable (IMHO) levels.
This was my post:
Submitted by CA renter on July 1, 2010 – 9:14pm.
Thanks, pemeliza. I didn’t think you were trying to make it personal at all. Thanks for your post, though. 🙂
Believe it or not, there are still a lot of places across the nation that are still not affordable to the people who are living and working there. The bubble was allowed to burst in many places, but not all. From what I’m hearing, they saw the same pattern everywhere else that we’ve seen here: the lowest-tier homes declined because there was no buffer, whatsoever. The mid-higher tier areas have held up better because the govt began their various props just as the declines were hitting these better areas. It’s not just the “prime” areas in NCC that are being propped up, it’s everywhere (unless the area was hit by something else, like the decimation of their job base like Detroit, etc.).
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When you see a macro trend like that (lower end in a given region has fallen steeply, while the mid-upper tiers have remained relatively stable, relatively-speaking), chances are the same trends here in San Diego are due to the same factors — like govt/Fed intervention — rather than the notion that “we’re different here.”
