The Lawrence Journal World reports from Kansas. "It would have been a good month - 47 new single-family homes springing from the Lawrence ground. But neither local builders, nor the economy, had that type of month. Instead, 47 was the total number of Lawrence single-family housing starts for the first six months of the year. 'It's bad,' said Bobbie Flory, executive director of the Lawrence Home Builders Association. 'The national homebuilders association says we haven't had a downturn in our industry like this since the Depression.'"

"To put the recent numbers in perspective, the city for nearly a dozen consecutive years started more than 300 new homes per year. That level of building, however, hasn't happened in the city since 2004."

"Home sale numbers are not any more encouraging. Marion Johnson, the Douglas County Appraiser, said his office has recorded 927 sales in the county through June. That's down from about 1,200 sales in the same time period last year, which was far from a record-setting season."

"'From where I'm sitting, I'm not seeing any signs of a turnaround,' Johnson said."

"It has left Flory to admittedly plead like a broken record to consumers. 'I just keep saying that it is a great time to buy a home,' Flory said. 'Interest rates are low, inventory is high and builders are motivated to sell.'"

The Chicago Journal from Illinois. "This July, Julie Marburger owes the property manager of her condominium building at 1717 S. Prairie a check totaling $5,226. And, as Marburger put it, 'the big one's looming.' Next year, Marburger, the owner of a one-bedroom unit in the building since 2004, will owe an additional $26,015 to complete her share of the $6.5 million assessment."

"The building was constructed in 2002 with the first residents closing on units in November 2003. The developer turned the building over to the newly constituted board in August 2004. It wasn't long after that turnover that the problems started emerging at the building."

"Marburger has stopped shopping like she used to. She's not eating out and has skipped vacations to brace for the payments. If she drains her savings account to pay for the assessment-her bank recently declined to extend her home equity loan-she will be living paycheck to paycheck."

"'Here I am a first-time homeowner. You can imagine how disheartened I am,' Marburger said recently. 'And here's the bottom line: It is forcing people into foreclosure. I am not there. I am not close to being there. But the thought and fear of that is just devastating is to me. I love this building. But our developer has totally devastated us.'"

The Sandusky Register from Ohio. "Realtors say in spite of major slumps elsewhere and a sluggish economy, the housing market in the Sandusky area is holding steady. Not everyone is buying into it, however."

"In the most recent year, 525 houses sold for an average sale price of $135,000. As of Thursday, there were 676 houses for sale in the county, with an average listed price of $209,000. Huron appraiser Jim Delahunt said he views the statistics as a sign of a market that is still 'somewhat fragile.'"

"'I don't know that we've hit the bottom yet, but it looks like property values are stable from year to year,' he said. 'Compared to two years ago, though, they've dropped.'"

"Others say if the price is right, the buyers will still take the bait. 'I think people think they'll take a big hit on their home if they sell it, but really if they're buying in the same market, they should do just fine,' said Sally Routh of Coldwell Banker Routh Realty. 'This is the 11th-best year in the housing market in 50 years.'"

The Niles Daily Star from Michigan. "Figures by the Board of Realtors for the Niles-Buchanan and Galien area for June show...dollars fell 34 percent from over $7 million in June of 2007 to $4.7 million last month. There was a 27 percent drop in units sold with 46 units sold last month - down from 63 in 2007. Average sale prices are down 9 percent."

"When asked if the market is really as bad as it seems, Jan Luke, a Realtor in Niles said 'I believe that's a misconception. I think for the buyers it's a good time, because the sellers are more negotiable,' she added. 'And they need to be.'"

"Buyers in the past may have been able to get themselves into homes that they couldn't necessarily afford, explains Peggy Roberts, mortgage and loan officer with Chemical Bank in Niles."

"Now, with the economy in its current state of struggle and flux, 'I think you're finding that lenders are being ... more conservative,' Roberts said. 'Qualifications for a customer are very, very strict..'"

"It would seem that buyers buying smart is about more than just a good deal on a home - but a new tactic in gaining on the negative numbers. In a struggling economy - it may just come down to a test of wills. The will to shift focus from extravagant buying to economical buying."

"'You don't want to live for your house payment,' said Roberts. 'If you're going to be living to make your house payment - life's too short for that.'"

Minnesota Public Radio. "It was only about 10 months ago that talk of a recession in this country started heating up. But the beginnings of the slowdown in Minnesota can be traced back several years."

"In order to nail down when and where the trouble really did start showing up, we actually have to go back several years to housing's boom times, when builders and others were laying the foundation for the downturn. For that, we're heading for the Twin Cities suburbs -- and 2003."

"Builder Todd Bjerstedt says at the start of the decade, before the boom, builders were framing up an average of 12,000-13,000 new houses per year."

"'And it just kind of snowballed in the years of 2003 and 2004, building in excess of 23,000 homes per year,' Bjerstedt said. 'So we had in those two years alone, almost a 10,000 (homes) per year jump in new construction.'"

""Diana Carter founded her company, WinStar Mortgage Partners, seven years ago, after years in the mortgage business. Carter found the good times in her industry profitable but nerve-wracking as well. Doubts kept nagging at her."

"'This is artificial, this is not real. Is there going to be a bubble? What's going to happen?'"

"While Carter did not offer high-risk subprime loans, she did sell...the in-between mortgages called 'Alt-A loans.' She got pressure to offer those loans from the national mortgage lender Countrywide."

"Countrywide would buy some of WinStar's loans, bundle them with other loans into bonds, and sell the bonds to investors. Those investors were hungry for new, potentially lucrative places to put their money. So they were asking mortgage lenders to keep sending bundles of mortgage debt their way -- even risky mortgage debt."

"Countrywide obliged, and pushed Carter to get on board with those risky Alt-A loans."

"'Some of their top executives were saying, 'You need to look at expanding your product mix if you're going to increase your profit margins. This is a really important part of the business. You have to look at doing this,' Carter said. 'And I'm thinking, 'I don't think so. No, I don't think so.'"

"But Carter says she eventually felt like she had to do Alt-A loans to compete in the marketplace. So she started to offer them and did well initially. It was a move she would later regret. 'We basically put a target on our chest and said, 'Here, hit me,' Carter said."

"'I was in that model here on your right when I first started to hear about the incentives being tossed around in the marketplace,' Bjerstedt said. The incentives he mentions were a sign the market for new homes was starting to collapse."

"But Bjerstedt couldn't afford to cut his prices to match other builders. 'My sales went from roughly 20 homes a year to one or two a year, almost overnight,' he said."

"At the time, Bjerstedt was totally baffled. Builders were still pulling plenty of permits to start new homes. The housing market looked really robust. 'Somebody called a timeout, and I wasn't ready,' Bjerstedt said."

"Keep in mind: This is spring of 2005 -- way earlier than when most people usually associate with the housing downturn. Job growth in residential construction went negative in Minnesota in mid-2005. That's about a year and half earlier than the national average."

"By 2006, the subprime market was faltering under a crush of loan defaults and foreclosures. But the Alt-A market didn't look so bad yet. So Diana was upbeat about her business. 'Even in December of 2006, I was working with my staff to invest in growth, to add more sales people to really increase what we were doing,' she said."

'Despite that optimism in 2006, Carter says things started to unravel in early 2007. Investors were getting skittish. By the spring of 2007, the investment banks, which had acted as intermediaries between investors and lenders like WinStar, wanted out. And when the investment banks pulled back, Diana Carter had a big problem.'

"'There may have been 15 places I could sell the loan on January 1. At the end of March, there was either zero places to sell them or one place to sell them,' Carter said."

"One day in March 2007, one of Carter's managers came into her office. Carter recalls him telling her, 'We have $4 million of unsalable mortgages.'"

"T'he unsalable loans kept piling up. They went from "$8 million, to $10 million, to $14 million to $20 million of loans that we could not sell,' Carter said."

"Today, Carter only sees her WinStar office from the outside looking in. All the walls have been torn down, and the desks are long gone. Carter closed WinStar a year ago, after a wave of default and foreclosure notices swamped the business. WinStar wasn't alone."

"By 2007, lenders nationwide had accumulated hundreds of thousands of foreclosed properties on their books -- with about 38,000 of them in Minnesota. At a recent foreclosure auction in north Minneapolis, bidders could snap up neighborhood properties for prices as low as $30,000."

"It turns out that in Minneapolis at least, more than half of those foreclosed properties belonged to investors."

"Last July, one of the big investment houses on Wall Street got scorched. Two Bear Stearns hedge funds laden with subprime mortgages had pretty much lost their value. 'The first week of August last year, suddenly the phone started ringing,' recalled Ed Padilla, the CEO of Northmarq Capital Partners. 'It was just one call after another. And there was not any question that something was going on in the marketplace, very dramatic, and happening very rapidly.'"

"Despite that beating, it's clear Padilla hasn't lost his sense of humor about it. He laughs when asked what he told his wife that week. 'I think it was something along the line of, 'The party's over. It's time to change our perspective,' Padilla remembered."