Our so far favorite phrase, "fictitious housing wealth," occurs in this chunk of text:
While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth. These typically less affluent places are likely to become less wealthy still in the coming years, and will continue to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis behind them.Our heart pumps piss for the poor bastards & their fictitious housing wealth. "Ain't that a shame," as Fats Domino would have it.
Two of our favorite cities, Phoenix, AZ, & Las Vegas, NV, in particular, aren't getting out of it easily. "Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes" is a fine phrase as well.
Yet the boom itself neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes. [...] Will people wash out of these places as fast as they washed in, leaving empty sprawl and all the ills that accompany it? Will these cities gradually attract more businesses and industries, allowing them to build more-diverse and more-resilient economies? Or will they subsist on tourism—which may be meager for quite some time—and on the Social Security checks of their retirees? No matter what, their character and atmosphere are likely to change radically.The entire article is actually interesting; its major thrust is that what we've known for the last seventy-odd yrs. is over, baby!
Some cities and regions will eventually spring back stronger than before. Others may never come back at all. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a whole way of life.That's your life (maybe even lives) bourgeois pigs/suburban scumbags!
An added bonus is the lack of economic jargon, statistics, & prediction. No dates of recovery guessed at, no assumptions that people will act rationally, etc. Not bad for the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
But we should mention our quibbles w/ this academic. We're doubtless more opposed to home ownership than he is (Property is theft!) but his opposition is based on home owning impeding the labor force's hopping wherever its corporate master needs it to go.
And there's a tinge of elitism throughout. He's the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, & you can bet that he assumes all of his clever friends w/ their post-graduate degrees (looking down their noses at we, the people) are going to do just fine in their creative, mostly coastal enclaves, while the Rust & Sun Belters will be SOL in their decaying cities & overdeveloped Ponzi sheme suburbs/exurbs.
Although we're no longer sure what our position on elitism is. (Or why we need to have a position on it, even.) We probably should be for it, as it seems to bother the commoners of the right. Depends on which elite's ox is being gored, really.
No comments:
Post a Comment