Sinking housing market maroons homeowners

[El Pinko]

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_8891790


Sinking housing market maroons homeowners

By Deborah Yao
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Article Created: 04/11/2008 10:52:31 AM PDT

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. — At the new community of Seapine Estates, street names like Sea Foam Drive and Shoreline Road are meant to evoke a feeling of coastal tranquility. Instead, the two dozen or so residents of this New Jersey Shore development, near Atlantic City, feel anything but peace. The Pennsylvania builder went bankrupt last summer and halted work, leaving open foundations, unfinished homes and empty streets that have invited outsiders to dump trash, spray graffiti and race cars.

....

The housing market remains in the doldrums: All but one of 20 metropolitan areas showed home price declines in January from a year ago, down 10.7 percent overall, according to the latest figures from the widely watched Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index. Sixteen of the 20 metro areas posted record lows, with Las Vegas and Miami tying for the weakest market. Only Charlotte, N.C., bucked the trend, eking out an almost 2 percent gain.

Ken Bachman, 37, who lives on a half-empty street in Seapine, feels trapped. When he leaves the house every day, he has to look at an unsightly, unfinished home across the street. Bankrupt Elliott Building Group of Langhorne, Pa., had planned more than 200 houses in the development with prices starting around $300,000, but residents say the community is only about a fifth occupied.

"It's an undesirable place to live right now," Bachman said. "Homes have been on the market for sale in here for over a year and they're just not selling, because who wants to move into a development that's bankrupt?"

[Jed Dilligan]

1. You know

Today for the first time I actually thought about buying a house.

[Skittles]

3. wait until it settles down, Jed

there will be way more of these "undesirable areas" popping up :(

[Jed Dilligan]

4. I already live in a fairly undesirable area

When a house near my work in decent repair dips into the five digits, I'm on it.

[Skittles]

5. that is certainly the upside to this mess

I, too, never bought a house because of the prices. It's the principle - I will not overpay - period.

[Jed Dilligan]

6. Exactly. When the market was "hot" I was like,

half a million for a house? No way!

[notesdev]

8. Same here

I was ready to buy something in 2005 but the prices were so insane there's no way I was going to sign for that amount of money.

Didn't stop the real-estate industry from chomping at the bit to try to sell something to me, though. They calculated the limit of what I could possibly borrow, and tried to sell me houses based on that figure. That experience taught me how financially insane the people who bought during the boom years were.

[Trajan]

2. Isnt there some sort of insurance that covers bankruptcy by the builder ?...

Hmmmm .... That is a pretty fucked up deal ...

[Jeff_The_Man]

7. Ouch!!

[BR_Parkway]

9. It's a shame, but where did all these folks think that we were going to

keep pumping out buyers for $300,000 houses?

I'm amazed (maybe not as much as I should be) at the number of people in this country who never stopped to ask where all these McMansion buyers were going to come from to purchase all the homes that were being built. Are they all that disconnected and uninformed about how much the average family makes in the US?