Seattle Bubble

Here’s yet another story for you with the premise that Seattle is not in a bubble at all. This one comes courtesy of the Seattle P-I.
Home prices in some parts of the country might be primed for a decline, putting a drag on the nation’s economy, but Seattle apparently could avoid the problem of [...]

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The Seattle P-I chimes in today with another story of the local housing bubble’s windfall tax revenues for local governments. Specifically, this story is about the city of Seattle.
Everybody’s talking about Seattle’s red-hot housing market.
People who want to buy in, people who want to cash out and people who are getting rich off the [...]

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Today’s Seattle Times has this story on the builders vs. city battle going on in Sammamish.
Since incorporating in 1999, [Sammamish] city officials have scrambled to stem the tide of new housing projects by passing growth moratoriums. The last one expired in August and was replaced by a new “growth metering” ordinance — the first of [...]

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CNN/Money provides a short interview with a professor who claims that his study shows that home prices in many of America’s cities, including Seattle, are perfectly in line with history.
Are home values in America’s biggest cities out of whack with the rest of the country?
Chris Mayer, a finance and economics professor who heads the Milstein [...]

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The Times today features a special report on housing, with a graphic that I found particularly pertinent.
In the past five years, real hourly wages have grown by only 2 percent while the median home price has increased by 52 percent. Though homeownership levels are currently high, a good portion is due to the use of [...]

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While King County’s 17 percent year-on-year price increase is impressive and baffling, even more so is Kitsap County’s 23 percent year-on-year increase. What could possibly be driving prices in the rural east Puget Sound county? Definitely not wage increases.
August home prices were 23 percent higher than those in August 2004, topping three years’ [...]

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