Housing Index Is Expected to Show a New Low in Prices

[n2doc]

By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: May 30, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — The desire to own your own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression.

Even as the economy began to fitfully recover in the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004. The ownership rate is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier.

Disenchantment with real estate is bound to swell further on Tuesday when the most widely watched housing index is all but guaranteed to show that prices of existing homes sank in March below the lows reached two years ago — until now the bottom of the housing crash. In February, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of 20 large cities slumped for the seventh month in a row.

Housing is locked in a downward spiral, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because even those who are solvent are opting out.

more
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/business/31housing.html

[n2doc]

1. And...it does.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chibrkbus-sp-us-home-price-index-falls-to-doubledip-in-march-20110531,0,3480236.story

[LiberalEsto]

2. And this is the Great Depression #2

despite the corporate media's insistence on calling it a downturn or recession.

[JustAnotherGen]

3. I'm one of the solvent ones

My fiance and me we are very twitchy about buying a home. First, we aren't locked into this mentality that you HAVE to live in a house to be 'successful' and second - why buy something that's value is basically going to be like a vehicle? I.E. With in a month of it being in your possession it loses value? BTW? We both outright own late model vehicles that were reasonably priced to begin with. So that's our mentality there . . . live under your means/buy under your means. This is almost impossible to do in the New Jersey housing market.

[Raschel]

4. It's not surprising since many jobs now pay $11 -$12 an hr. Homes have a long way to fall

until many families can afford them.