09-02-2018, 09:53 AM
(09-02-2018, 05:31 AM)Teejay Wrote: I am in full agreement with Neil Howe and I can provide an antipodean perspective (Australia and New Zealand). We here avoided the first Global Financial Crisis which hit North America and Europe very hard. The downside of that is that the housing bubble which was already pretty big when the GFC hit, inflated even more since then.
Overall Australia and New Zealand are about as bad as California was before the last Global Financial Crisis, when it comes to the housing bubble. Australia I believe because of reasons I have stated on another thread is going to face an economic depression on the scale of Greece's once the housing bubble collapses. This economic depression will be considered by future historians to be worse than the Great Depression was. The prospect of this happening is soon is about as scary as dying for me.
We have been building the wrong sorts of housing in America -- horrid McMansions and prefabricated slums -- since the real-estate meltdown. We should have been building plain, honest tract houses analogous (if updated) to those that returning GI heroes found fully adequate.
With their architectural pomposity and shabby construction, the McMansions will likely not have the durability of the honest bungalows that came into existence in the late 40s. Apartments? If you think Detroit is bad, it was an analogue to Silicon Valley as the home of the highest technology (automobiles) at the time, and it attracted people from all over the world to work in the auto plants. Detroit had almost two million people at its peak and very high rents. Does that sound familiar? Just think of what San Jose can be like when it is no longer such a mecca for talented people who spend half their income on property rent. Oh, but it is California... have you ever heard of Richmond, California? It is a real dump. A paradise climate will not be enough.
Property values increase because more people are competing to live in such housing exists. But speculation gets ahead of the cost curve, and people keep saying such things as "The Good Lord isn't making more real estate". Contrary to the myth that real-estate promoters push and that politicians enforce, anything can be priced too high, and when the prices are too high the collapse is certain.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.