even seniors are looking for roommates

sniglet

It looks like demand for housing is changing even for seniors. With everyone looking for roommates, over-all demand for housing is permanantly adjusting downwards.

"In the last few months we've experienced explosive growth in interest by homeowners age 50-plus to find rooms and roommates," says Jacqueline Grossmann, Chicago coordinator for the National Shared Housing Resource Center. "The trend now is getting younger and younger. People in their 50s and 60s are losing their nest eggs and increasingly willing to give up their privacy in exchange for rents of $500, $600 a month."

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/03/boomers-future-went-down-drain.html

This all reminds me of the "Kit Kittredge" movie. Set in the 1930s, we see Kit's family fall on hard times and turn their roomy suburban home into a boarding house to make ends meet.

rose-colored-coolaid

Don't tell jon, he's still convinced demand literally can't fall unless a man with a scythe and black robe walks through town killing indiscriminately.

jon

We can agree to disagree on whether this is a temporary crisis that will revert back to more normal circumstances. If people are still bunking with roommates they find online in 2012 then we can assuredly wave Obama, Pelosi, and Reid good-bye and welcome whomever our new Reagan turns out to be. By then the population will be 10 million higher than it is now, and the inventory problems of today will be long gone. The focus will be all the inflation and taxes we will be paying for the giveaways they are doing now.

rose-colored-coolaid

jon wrote:

We can agree to disagree on whether this is a temporary crisis that will revert back to more normal circumstances. If people are still bunking with roommates they find online in 2012 then we can assuredly wave Obama, Pelosi, and Reid good-bye and welcome whomever our new Reagan turns out to be. By then the population will be 10 million higher than it is now, and the inventory problems of today will be long gone. The focus will be all the inflation and taxes we will be paying for the giveaways they are doing now.

Fox News much? Since the Republican party is in utter disarray, they seem to have grasped onto the refrain that unless the stimulus package works flawlessly, Obama's popularity will plummet to levels nearly as bad as the Republican Party. It's an unsophisticated perspective, and it misses the zeitgeist of our times.

Specifically, there's an undercurrent moving through the population right now of retraction from consumption. Savings rates for the last quarter actually went up to 5%. Considering people were losing jobs and commissions, that's amazing. Moreover, you don't hear a lot of people complaining about cutting back. They are bragging about getting deals, or how they don't even miss cable TV, or just saying how nice it is to actually be building a little breathing room in their monthly budgets. In four years, if the economy is stabilized, even if they are still living with roommates, Obama will probably win a second term.

The case where he doesn't is if we are still hemorrhaging jobs and people are still losing their homes.