Seattle Bubble

The Center for Economic and Policy Research came out with another great paper this month titled The Cost of Maintaining Ownership in the Current Crisis
Here’s an excerpt from the summary (emphasis mine):
The collapse of the bubble in the U.S. housing market is creating chaos in financial markets while throwing the economy into a recession. It [...]

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This is a little redundant, but that’s why I’m posting it on a Saturday. It’s just a slightly different take on the economic fundamentals that allegedly drive the local housing market. Much of this data comes from the recently-released 2007 King County Annual Growth Report. You can get all these charts and [...]

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The big local housing story today is a study that was released recently by University of Washington Economics professor Theo Eicher. The thrilling title of the study is “Municipal and Statewide Land Use Regulations and Housing Prices Across 250 Major US Cities,” and it may be found (along with a number of related materials) [...]

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Apparently the only necessarily qualification for becoming a “world class” or “superstar” city is to keep on repeating that it is so. That’s the message I’m getting from the latest quotes from the Realtor’s spokesman Lawrence Yun, anyway.
Seattle-area home prices are manageable for typical workers, according to the chief economist for the National Association [...]

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Remember how when prices were going up, up, up, one of the reasons it was allegedly justified was “high construction costs”? See this post for a lengthy example of a local real estate professional making that argument. Well, luckily for us, it would seem that construction costs are dropping like a rock. [...]

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I want to talk about Snohomish Co., not that there’s anything wrong with King Co. (hey, I grew up on 23rd and Prospect on Capitol Hill, so I know the area). Not everyone in Snohomish Co. drives Ford trucks, has big hair/mullet and listens to Cinderella or Quiet Riot. [...]

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