A housing report from the Chicago Tribune. "As the housing boom winds down the finger-pointing is just warming up. Last week, home builder Robert Toll, CEO of Toll Bros., one of the country's largest builders, jumped on the blame bandwagon, pointing to terrorism, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina as reasons for the weakened demand for housing."

"Among the leading suspects: a bubble-obsessed news media; overly cheery housing-industry economists; zealous real estate agents; and bankers offering low mortgage interest rates that carried on too long. Overly lax lending standards that made homeowners of people who could not afford it; the horde of neophyte investors who overpaid for their acquisitions; and builders throwing up too many houses."

"Without doubt, the market has slowed. David and Erin Kerpel of Deerfield are representative of those statistics. In July they bought a bigger house across the street from where they have lived for three years. They expected a quick sale of their former residence. But after a few showings they are still waiting for an offer."

"'It's dead. The market is dead,' David Kerpel said recently. 'There are no buyers.' 'I'm tempted to say that, yes, the market is dead,' said North Side broker Bruce Theobald."

"That's probably because there is an avalanche of homes for sale. In the Chicago area alone more than 95,000 properties are on the MLS of Northern Illinois, fully 40 percent more than a year ago."

"Area sales prices were still on the plus side in July, the Realtors said. That may be about to change."

"'I'm probably going to say that prices turned negative [in numerous metro markets] this month,' when September sales data are released in October, David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said Tuesday."

"'For a couple of quarters you'll see price drops from 2 to 5 percent,' he said in an interview. 'It's going to be short-lived, though. If there's any national downturn, it will probably last a quarter.' That's because Lereah predicts the market will pick up again next year after sellers begin to cut prices this fall."

"'They will have to, he says. He says that all talk of the Fed's role, shaky mortgages and irrational speculators aside, what's at the root of the market stall is sellers' reluctance to budge on their asking price."

"Lereah focuses on speculators who acquired properties too high and mortgage products whose interest rates have begun to reset at unaffordably higher rates. 'Basically the speculators and the exotic mortgage instruments, interest-only loans and zero-down payment loans that permitted households to purchase at lofty prices, they emptied the punch bowl at the party,' he said."

"'This boom would have gone on a little longer if not for them,' Lereah said. 'They took prices up higher than they should have been.'"

"Broker Theobald said 'the non-stop volume of articles on the housing bubble, well, it seems like it did become a self-fulfilling prophecy.' Lereah sees some truth to that. 'A lot of Realtors are very angry at the media,' he said. 'By discussing the boom building and by anticipating the boom busting, I think it did add to some of the negative psychology.'"

"Lereah and his fellow housing industry economists don't come out unscathed. Critics say they generated unfounded optimism that the housing market would soar perpetually. Lereah counters that he has been forecasting a change for some time. 'I've been wrong for three years in a row. I've said we're about to get a correction. For three years, I've said, 'This is the year that sales will come down.'"

"'But now, it's not because mortgage rates went up, it's because of the psychology of the marketplace,' he said. 'The prices just got too high.'"