posted on Sep, 17 2008 @ 05:21 PM
In my humble opinion, as a home builder, my take on the mess is that the congress of the USA is at fault.
The dictum was to make housing affordable to all and there are certain hard costs involved in building a house. Congress said make the loans, to
everybody, don't you worry about their credit history.!! Why else do you think the U.S. Gov't. bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? It was their
fault.
When labor saw the feeding frenzy going on, and then we had to deal with a labor shortage, costs rose, thus artificially inflating the costs of goods,
read; housing.
As the feeding frenzy continued, investors, rightly or wrongly got into the real-estate speculation game. These are the people that you now see being
"forced out of their homes", for the most part. I can take you to a few sub-divisions that I worked and show you foreclosed houses 2 years old that
have never been lived in. Not to say good, hard working people aren't losing their homes, but my 1st hand observations are that few peolple were at
first losing their homes.
The problem has now gone exponential, i.e, investors have lost their investments (got in too late in the curve), people that helped to overbuild the
market are now sitting with over valued property they can't unload, durable goods orders are down as a result, construction workers who, as an
historical trait are not boyscouts, are unable to find other work are sitting idle, collecting unemployment benefits, thus raising the dire numbers
and cutting back on expendable income spending.
It is a slipprey slope we are on and unless Congress loosens up credit again or we ride out this crunch,(I prefer the latter), we are going to have a
tough row to hoe.