“Sam Chanden from Chanden Economics (and an adjunct professor at Wharton) was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying that the housing bust is over...”
Sorry, but it took me a few minutes to get off the floor laughing. According to the ‘experts’ the housing bust has been over since 2005...in other words, just before it began. They been saying that the bust is over NON-STOP for the past 7 years, and they will say it, WRONGLY, for the next 7 years.
The housing market is SICK, very sick, there are foreclosures all over the place and millions of houses that are not occupied. It will take at least a decade to clear them out...it is simple supply and demand, nothing more.
So, if we want to end the housing bust there are two options: (1) Increase demand by either improving the economy (fat chance), or increasing the number of people that need housing via Amnesty (who knows - maybe). Or (2) decrease the supply - simply knock down the extra housing. They’re doing that in Detroit and some other cities, and they’ve taken down some really bad, new, neighborhoods in California.
But if neither is done on a large scale, then we must wait for a combination of economics (i.e., more people being able to afford to live on their own), or demographics (more population). We’ll, eventually, get there, but we would have already been there had the government (Bush, the Fed, and Obama) not juiced the market so much with near-zero interest rates that we’re still building houses (albeit at a very slow rate).
From different things I read the housing market may not come back for another 10 or 12 years. That might be based on if Obama stays in office for another four years.
What a joke this article is. We moved from Orange County to Riverside County, CA in 2005. Since that time, the assessed value of our home has decreased every year since 2007. We just checked the county assessor’s website where assessed valuations for the upcoming tax year are listed. Our assessed value is down another .7%. It is now $273,000 below where it would have been assessed under Prop. 13 had the housing bubble not burst. If you own a home in California, and you purchased it between 2000 and 2007, as long as you do not want to sell, you are benefiting significantly as your property taxes have continued to decrease, usually by several thousand dollars a year.