The American Dream Turned Nightmare
Jennifer Steinhauer has written a lengthy piece for the New York Times on the housing bust; particularly in Southern California where many houses are worth half of what people paid for them.
An excerpt:
“Building permits for properties valued at a record $12.5 billion were issued in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in 2005; in 2008, the figure was $3.8 billion, according to John Husing, an economist whose expertise is Southern California. “You have to think of it like a gold-mining town in a Clint Eastwood movie,” Mr. Husing said. “Money comes to a place where there has never been any, and next there are tool stores, a saloon, a general store and so on. But the saloon doesn’t exist without the gold mine, and the gold mine here was construction.”
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/us/23bethone.html
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