The Housing Bubble

Realtors are liars.

Why buy a house at these massively inflated prices when you can rent for half the monthly cost?

“It is a bet on an older, poorer America, to whom mobile homes are a last resort. Millions can’t afford rising apartment rents or home prices, or earn wages that are falling or flat.

That means mobile home park landlords and investors are assured steady business and a captive audience, even in the face of rising fees.

As Frank Rolfe, a park owner who runs Mobile Home University, a boot camp for investors, told Bloomberg, “We’re like a Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths.”

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/mobile-home-park-investors-bet-on-older-poorer-america/2180277

There you have it. They want you in chains, or all foamed up, on the runway. Poor, rich… whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re foam. A captive audience. A revenue stream.

Drop out. Resist. Rent.

What is the answer to the question?

BECAUSE THEY CAN!

What was the question that was just answered?

Why do some lenders continuously try to rip off people?

Here’s an example, a complaint from a guy who almost got ripped off by a company called “World Business Lender”:

“World Business Lenders contacted me about capital to help with cash flow for small businesses like ours. They talked to us about how great there rates were and they were in the business of helping small businesses like ours receive working capital instead of getting the caplital from regular banks. I was told at first that the rate would be somewhere between 5-15% iinterest and repayment terms up to 12 months. I was also told that the decisions to borrow tha capital was based on the companies past 12 month bank statements. I was also told that my personal credit would not have to be used in their decision. ALL LIES!!!!

“When I finally filled out the application, they did pull my personal credit report without telling me and they sent back and offer with the following terms:

“Beginning Principal: $10,575.00 - $575.00 is a fee that I was not told about

“Payment schedule - 125 Daily payments of $120.48

“1 Final payment - $56.52

“Total number of payments 126

“Total balance due in 126 days - $15,116.52 (That right, its not a TYPO, $15,116.52)

“That is an interest rate of 843%. My purposee of writing this complaint is to warn anyone that is contacted by this company to watch out for their tactics. They tell you everything I stated above and then give you an offer that is no where close to what was originally discussed. It will cost you a lot of time and inquiries on your credit report.

“DO NOT TAKE THIS COMPANIES CALL!!! I can not emphasize this enough!”

“Every time I read about a Teabagger ranting about how socialized medicine will destroy this country I think of the VA system.”

Left’s VA-Worship Comes Back to Bite

Ben Shapiro

As the fallout from the Veterans Administration cooking of the books and the related deaths of over three dozen veterans continues, President Obama took to the podium on Wednesday to explain that problems at the VA are nothing new. On Wednesday, President Obama took to the podium to first express his tremendous anger – VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was “mad as hell” but President Obama was “madder than hell,” thus winning the rage sweepstakes – and then explained that the VA’s issues go back years:

“[A]ll of us, whether here in Washington or all across the country, have to stay focused on the larger mission, which is upholding our sacred trust to all of our veterans, bringing the VA system into the 21st century, which is not an easy task…. caring for our veterans is not an issue that popped up in recent weeks. Some of the problems with respect to how veterans are able to access the benefits that they’ve earned, that’s not a new issue.

Obama’s statement, however, was remarkably short on actual solutions for the VA. Throwing money at the problem hasn’t fixed it: using 2011 dollars, America spent $88.8 billion on the VA in 2007, and $125.3 billion on the VA in 2012.

And herein lies the problem for the left: the failures at the VA, including its bureaucratic incompetence, its waiting lists, and its deaths, all debunk the notion that a government-run healthcare system will work. It’s a fresh slap in the face to all those commentators who, in pushing Obamacare, endorsed the VA as a model.

There are some pretty big names on that list. Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA’s “huge success story”:

“Multiple surveys have found the VHA providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.

Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.”

Similarly, Nicholas Kristof of the Times wrote in 2009:

“Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effectiveelements in the American medical establishment.

Just last year, Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton wrote in the pages of the Times:

“Remarkably, Americans of all political stripes have long reserved for our veterans the purest form of socialized medicine, the vast health system operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (generally known as the V.A. health system). If socialized medicine is as bad as so many on this side of the Atlantic claim, why have both political parties ruling this land deemed socialized medicine the best health system for military veterans? Or do they just not care about them?

Or try the RAND Corporation: “If other health care providers followed the V.A.’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system.”

Then there’s Voxsplainer Ezra Klein, who wrote in the Washington Post in 2009 that “expanding the Veterans Health Administration to non-veterans” was “one of my favorite ideas.”

Jonathan Golob of The Seattle Stranger has written in the same vein: “Every time I read about a Teabagger ranting about how socialized medicine will destroy this country I think of the VA system. There it is, a huge and vastly important universal healthcare system—government run, single payer and therefore socialist—right here in the brave and privatized United States: The Veterans Affairs hospitals.”

The left has routinely used the VA as a club to wield in favor of socialized medicine. No wonder they’re running scared from the current VA scandal – which, as President Obama rightly notes, has been underway for decades.

http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/shapiro-lefts-va-worship-comes-back-bite - 43k -

the bankers need you to take on more debt.

Big investors are betting against housing
Ben Eisen - MarketWatch - 5/23/2014

Some of Wall Street’s most vocal investors are betting against housing, saying the recovery has fizzled out.

Earlier this month, DoubleLine Capital founder Jeffrey Gundlach took to the podium at a highly watched investment conference to suggest shorting the popular SPDR S&P Homebuilders exchange traded fund XHB +1.89% . He pointed to a concern, cited by others, that would-be young buyers are shunning mortgages .

Real-estate investor Sam Zell says he expects the Homeownership rate to drop as low as 55% as more people delay marriages.

As investors take sides, Federal Reserve officials are doing so too . Charles Plosser, president of the Fed Bank of Philadelphia says housing fundamentals “remain sound” on Tuesday, while New York Fed Bank President Charles Dudley said later that day he believes there’s a “deep and protracted” housing downturn

I LUV it when people who vote for liberals/socialist have to actually live under their policies…

What could go wrong with this?

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City plans to attack economic segregation by moving poor into middle-class neighborhoods, richer into poverty spots
New York Daily News | May 21, 2014 | Erin Durkin

The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan — placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots.

Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city.

“We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday.

“That means that in some neighborhoods that have mostly middle or upper-income housing, that we would need to put affordable housing at the very lowest income,” she said.

“But in some communities where we have a great deal of poverty . . . we would try to bring more moderate (-income housing) into those neighborhoods, to try to achieve the kind of diversity that we want,” Been said.

De Blasio’s executive budget boosted the housing department’s capital cash to $3.1 billion, up from $1.9 billion in his January preliminary budget, to help pay for the ambitious proposal.

Exact locations where housing developments will be built have not yet been chosen.

Council housing chairman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn) hailed the proposal, though he said he anticipated some resistance both from affluent New Yorkers unhappy about low-income developments in their neighborhoods.

“I do think there will be some concern in certain communities,” he added. “We will have to explain to people why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Don’t Nationalize the VA’s Failures: They are endemic to government-run health care.
National Review | 05/22/2014 | Charles C.W. Cooke

A health-care system run and funded by a national government has been caught covering up its waiting lists, leaving patients without care for so long that they have died before they were attended to and, worst of all, perhaps, fudging the numbers in order to make itself and its political masters look more competent. I’m from England, and I’ve seen this movie before.

Many American conservatives have responded to the news that the Department of Veterans Affairs is being run precisely as one would have reasonably suspected that the VA was being run by training their fire on the Affordable Care Act. These “scandals,” the editors of Investor’s Business Daily argued ominously, “foreshadow life under Obamacare.” Well, not quite, no. For all of its many faults, Obamacare remains predicated upon a system of private insurance, maintains the nation’s network of private hospitals, and redirects taxpayers’ money toward the subsidization of monthly premiums rather than to the reimbursement of carriers. What the VA foreshadows is what the Left would like American health care to become in the future. And that is infinitely worse.

On paper, this all sounds rather nice, I suppose. But, having lived for 26 years under such a system, I cannot say that I share Krugman’s enthusiasm. Explaining the nature of the new National Health Service in the late 1940s, the British socialist Aneurin Bevan told reporters that “if a bedpan dropped in a hospital corridor, the reverberations should echo in Whitehall.” (“Whitehall” is the part of London in which the national government is located.) Bevan got his way — and how.

In the process of declaring Obamacare a success, President Obama and his cheerleaders have of late taken to insisting that the “debate is over.” But in all likelihood, the exact opposite is the case. If there is anything I learned from my series of poor experiences with Britain’s system, it is that the more that government involves itself in the provision, management, and oversight of health care, the more securely it is guaranteed that health care is all we’ll ever talk about. At his press conference this morning, President Obama hoped aloud that “our veterans don’t become another political football.” Again, too late, I’m afraid. When the government is responsible for taking care of the citizenry, their care is already a political question.

All of which is to say that this is not only a question of what government does to health care but of what health care does to government. As Patrick Brennan noted yesterday, the sorts of problems that we are seeing at the VA — “gaming statistics, secret waiting lists, long wait times for serious procedures” — “seem to be endemic to single-payer health systems and especially fully socialized ones (as in ones where the government employs the doctors and runs the hospitals, too, like the VA, Britain’s, and Spain’s).” In short: Governments can’t run health-care systems efficiently, which irritates people, which leads to governments lying about health care. It’s a mess.

Billionaire environmentalist — let that sink in for a moment…

And ONLY the Koch brothers are evil personified…

———————

Billionaire Tom Steyer will use clout and cash to boost Democrats, environment, in key races
Washington Post ^ | 05/22/2014 | Matea Gold

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer plans to finance full-fledged political campaigns in at least seven states key to Democratic fortunes in the 2014 midterms and the 2016 presidential race, further cementing his rapid rise as one of the party’s most influential patrons.

The independent efforts run by his super PAC, NextGen Climate, will include television ads, on-the-ground field organizing and get-out-the-vote operations that seek to mobilize voters on the local impacts of climate change. The group plans to highlight issues such as drought in Iowa and the rising cost of flood insurance in Florida. It will also spotlight the climate-change skepticism of GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates, and the campaign donations they have received from the fossil-fuel industry.

So far, the list of targeted Republicans includes Senate hopefuls Cory Gardner in Colorado, Terri Lynn Land in Michigan and Scott Brown in New Hampshire, as well as governors Rick Scott of Florida, Paul LePage of Maine and Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. The group also plans to target the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa.

One of the great scientists supporting lukewarmists:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/21/climategate-as-belief-system-tipping-point/

Here’s the latest housing report. To me it shows a fizzling of the past
years exuberance

WASHINGTON (May 22, 2014) – Existing-home sales increased for the first time this year in April, while inventory meaningfully increased and home price growth moderated, according to the National Association of Realtors®. Monthly sales gains in the West and South offset a modest decline in the Midwest while the Northeast was unchanged.

Total existing-home sales1, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, rose 1.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.65 million in April from 4.59 million in March, but are 6.8 percent below the 4.99 million-unit level in April 2013.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, expected the improvement. “Some growth was inevitable after sub-par housing activity in the first quarter, but improved inventory is expanding choices and sales should generally trend upward from this point,” he said. “Annual home sales, however, due to a sluggish first quarter, will likely be lower than last year.”

Total housing inventory2 at the end of April jumped 16.8 percent to 2.29 million existing homes available for sale, which represents a 5.9-month supply at the current sales pace, up from 5.1 months in March. Unsold inventory is 6.5 percent higher than a year ago, when there was a 5.2-month supply.

“We’ll continue to see a balancing act between housing inventory and price growth, which remains stronger than normal simply because there have not been enough sellers in many areas. More inventory and increased new-home construction will help to foster healthy market conditions,” Yun added.

The median existing-home price3 for all housing types in April was $201,700, which is 5.2 percent above April 2013; in the first quarter the median price was 8.6 percent above a year earlier. “Current price data suggests a trend of slower growth, which bodes well for preserving favorable affordability conditions in much of the country,” Yun said.

Earlier this month, NAR reported the market share of all-cash purchases has risen despite a downtrend in distressed home sales and investor activity. Distressed homes4 – foreclosures and short sales – accounted for 15 percent of April sales, down from 18 percent in April 2013.

Ten percent of April sales were foreclosures, and 5 percent were short sales. Foreclosures sold for an average discount of 16 percent below market value in April, while short sales were discounted 10 percent.

NAR President Steve Brown, co-owner of Irongate, Inc., Realtors® in Dayton, Ohio, said there was some heating of the market last month. “The typical time on market shrunk in April, with four out of 10 homes selling in less than a month,” he said. “Homes that show well and are properly priced tend to sell the fastest. More housing inventory gives buyers better choices, and takes the pressure off of the buying process, which is a welcome sign, especially for first-time buyers.”

Properties sold faster for the fourth straight month in April, reflecting the prolonged lag in inventory relative to demand. The median time on market for all homes was 48 days in April, down from 55 days in March; it was 43 days on market in April 2013.

Short sales were on the market for a median of 96 days in April, while foreclosures typically sold in 56 days and non-distressed homes took 45 days. Forty-one percent of homes sold in April were on the market for less than a month.

According to Freddie Mac, the national average commitment rate for a 30-year, conventional, fixed-rate mortgage was 4.34 percent in April, unchanged from March but up from 3.45 percent in April 2013.

First-time buyers continue to represent fewer than one-third of all buyers at 29 percent in April, down from 30 percent in March; they were 29 percent in April 2013.

All-cash sales comprised 32 percent of transactions in April, compared with 33 percent in March and 32 percent in April 2013. Individual investors, who account for many cash sales, purchased 18 percent of homes in April, up from 17 percent in March; they were 19 percent in April 2013. Seven out of 10 investors paid cash in April.

Single-family home sales inched up 0.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.06 million in April from 4.04 million in March, but are 7.7 percent below the 4.40 million pace a year ago. The median existing single-family home price was $201,100 in April, up 4.7 percent from April 2013.

Bottom line: If you live in a long time democrat and public union goon controlled city - your city will go bankrupt. Before that happens, the goons will tax you to infinity and destroy every city service you thought your taxes pay for (schools, roads, parks, street lighting, crime control, etc.).

You only solution is to leave or to radically shrink the city government (which will never happen).

——————————–

If Detroit’s Not Too Big To Fail… Neither Are Other Big American Cities
The American | 05/23/2014 | By Alex J. Pollock

With the instructive Detroit precedent, shrunken populations, and underfunded municipal pensions common, we can conclude that no city, not even Chicago, should be thought of as too big to fail.

About the bonds of Detroit, Barron’s said: “A lot of investors bought this debt because they assumed that the state of Michigan wouldn’t let its largest city default.” In other words, they assumed Detroit was “too big to fail.” Nonetheless, Detroit did default and became the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. This bankruptcy, with unfunded municipal employee pensions among the competing creditors, is a hugely important precedent. Is any city too big to fail?

Essential to understanding the record bankruptcy of “Detroit” is that it applies only to a small part of metropolitan Detroit. The bankrupt City of Detroit has only 17 percent of the population of the metropolitan area. Of the two Detroits, Smaller Detroit is broke, but Bigger Detroit, which is five times as big, isn’t.

Of course, Smaller Detroit used to be a lot bigger. “Coming out of World War II,” the Detroit Free Press reflected, “American industry was triumphant, and few centers of industry were riding higher than Detroit … Detroit exercised an outsized influence on the state’s politics and economy.” What is now Smaller Detroit, once a boom town, had its population peak in 1950 at 1.85 million. (On a personal note, in 1950 I was in the second grade in the Detroit public schools.) Since then, the city has lost 61 percent of its population, which at 714,000 is less than it was in 1920.

At its peak, the City of Detroit’s population represented 71 percent of the metropolitan area, now it is 17 percent; it was 29 percent of the State of Michigan, now it is 7 percent. Detroit is the largest city as a proportion of the state to go bankrupt. Its shrinkage made it politically easier to let it fail, as well as economically more likely that it would.

This basic demographic pattern is shared by many old manufacturing cities in the northeast United States. These include St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Milwaukee — listed in the order of percent population loss since their peak, which like Detroit was in 1950 for all of them except Milwaukee (which was in 1960). All have lost a large proportion of their population, ranging from 63 percent to 20 percent; all are significantly smaller than the rest of their respective metropolitan populations; and all have become much smaller proportions of their respective states.

Too, too funny.

I can’t wait for Holder to file “hate crime” charges against the boyfriend/apologize-go-getter.

And for obama to say if he had a son…

————————

‘Knockout game’ suspect chased down by victim’s friend
NY Post | 5/23/14 | By Philip Messing

A Brooklyn fare-beater allegedly punched a young woman in the face while apparently playing the “knockout game” in a Manhattan PATH station — and her friend chased him down, put him in a chokehold and forced him to apologize, sources said.

Ibrahim King, 36, allegedly slugged 21-year-old Elizabeth Mejia, breaking her orbital bone, in the Ninth Street station around 3:40 a.m. Sunday. “He looks at her for a very short moment and then he pulls his right fist back and lunges across the railing and punches her in the face,” said Mejia’s friend Steve Sala. Sala chased and grabbed King, then put him in a chokehold, ripping out one of his dreadlocks in the process.

These scandals are just being talked about because some people don’t like a black president and are racists..

—————–

The Scandals That Will Doom The Democrats In November
Townhall.com | May 23, 2014 | Donald Lambro

WASHINGTON - President Obama reluctantly went to the White House press room Wednesday to deal with yet another scandal that has hit his dysfunctional presidency.

This one is as bad as scandals get: our veterans were dying because they weren’t getting timely care at the VA hospitals that would have saved their lives. And there were leaked memos suggesting the long delayed appointments were rewritten to make the wait time seem shorter.

Making matters worse, the president took his sweet time to publicly address the life-or-death issues that have been festering in the VA for a number of years.

But this happened on Obama’s watch and it’s one more scandal on a growing pile of scandals over the course of his troubled presidency that is reaching critical mass in the midst of a game-changing midterm election year.

And all of them are going to be played out this summer and fall when the Republicans are showing new strength in their party primaries that threatens to topple Democratic control of the Senate in Obama’s last two years in office.

Here’s what the White House and the Democrats will be facing before the Nov. 4 elections:

The Benghazi scandal: A Republican-led, special House select committee will be taking new testimony and digging deeper into the White House’s role in a concocted story that the deaths of our ambassador and three others at the U.S. consulate in Libya were the result of a spontaneous protest over an internet video that got out of hand.

The attack, in fact, was carried out by trained al-Qaeda terrorists, after pleas from Ambassador Chris Stevens for increased security were denied by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

At the time, Obama was out campaigning for re-election, claiming al-Qaeda was now “on the run” and their forces and leadership had been “decimated.”

Obamacare: Its troubles, financial and otherwise, didn’t end with the disastrous rollout when the administration’s sign-up website went into a meltdown and was incapable of handling applications.

Since then, Obamacare has been hit by one problem after another, raising new doubts about whether enough younger, healthier Americans will sign up for coverage to cover the costs of older enrollees who have more health care needs. And it still isn’t precisely known how many of the eight million sign-ups will pay their monthly premiums. As many as 15 to 20 percent usually don’t.

However, there’s another, in many ways, more lethal issue that will be fiercely in play this year, especially in the key swing state contests. And that is the struggling Obama economy that Republicans will be campaigning on from Maine to California.

The U.S. economy virtually stopped growing in the first three months of this year, and most economists don’t see it taking off anytime soon, either. The consensus is that the economic growth rate will remain somewhere in the 2 percent range this year and next.

National retail sales were shockingly low in April, barely rising 0.1 percent, the Commerce Department said. That was reflected in overall poor earnings data on Wall Street that sent the stock market into a swoon earlier this week.

Slide Fire update: First containment reported for Arizona wildfire
Associated Press
7:47 AM, May 23, 2014

Firefighters established containment lines around 5 percent of the fire by late Thursday and were making good progress in keeping the fire from getting closer to communities south of Flagstaff, incident commander Tony Sciacca said Friday.

“Everything is holding this morning,” Sciacca told reporters during a briefing.

Weather conditions for the next several days look favorable, with increased humidity and a chance of rain, though rain also could lead to rock falls off steep canyon slopes denuded of vegetation, he said.

Let’s hope the rain shows up today.

Send out the SWAT teams, go after those government workers:

http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20140523&id=17645708

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32ZCnzp00

Rule #1 if you are going to write a book that makes politically charged claims…check your math.

FEMA Region VIII checking in.

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2014/feb/20/meet-paradise-team/

I’ve seen this before reporters reporting on the high cost to live in Ventura County CA

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-19/a-retirement-experiment-sell-house-pack-passport-keep-moving.html

Awesome.

I think I’d still have a “home base” (small house, small apartment, somewhere), but the idea of lots of travel is awesome.

on Zillow I saw a house just sold for 565K never thought they would get that price.

Transferred to Phoenix is why they sold.