However, I take objection to this being labeled a failure of de-regulation. The issue in not the quantity of regulation any more than the number of lines of code define a good or bad peice of software. The number of regulations and mandates on the financial system did not shrink during the past 10-20 years. Instead, bad regulation was introduced and good regulation removed.

Bubbles are pernicious beasts especially when they go on as long as this one did. People get convinced that what they saw was real.

Back in the tech bubble times, an acquaintance purchased Nortel stock at around $95. A great deal, it was $145 only a month ago. It promptly went down to $2 or something. The company is almost gone, the only sizable thing it has is a $3 billion pension fund to keep up.

Another friend called me last year and said he made more money on his house than he did working.

Ahh, if only money grew on trees every day.

Derek

I meant “a species divided by biology” but the black race in this country has unique issues as you noted. That wasn’t were I was going. I was more concerned about rectifying the lovey dovey ideal of the family with the reality of what I consider a serious level of sexual dysfunction in the modern world. It’s shuttled off the main screen as “deviant” behavior but I wonder about that – $10B business is serious money. At any rate the decline of the family is more than single women seeking alpha males as they backslide into “sub-replacement breeders.” Extending that paradigm to include “matriarchal” policies that feminize geopolitical interaction to the detriment of national security is a bridge too far. Element of truth? Yes. But it’s not the central player.

Slade: “On another note, it is interesting how gender, at a mythical or representational level, sparks the more existential, but subdued, reality of a race divided by biology.”

Hmmmmmmmmm.

In fact according to I believe the Urban Land Institute, the mortgage crisis was most severe in those metropolitan areas that had the most restrictive housing, zoning and planning policies.

Let me explain the situation in LA County. There is very little land zoned for development that has not been developed already. The vast majority of development is second and third generation development, where a house or units are torn down for either a larger house or a lot more units. The County and LA City have down zoned most residential property so growth is limited to just a few areas, often near public transit facilities, ( that don’t work well).

The result is a huge lack of supply of housing for the demand, and so as a consequence, a huge rise in housing prices and rents occurred over the last 15 years. This lack of supply created a speculative bubble. Many low income areas that were previously thought to be very undesirable became fairly expensive places to live.

In addition to the lack of supply, the more and more restrictive and demanding building and planning codes, environmental laws limiting manufacturing of building products, the longer and longer periods of time required for development, the increased risk in development, and the international building boom and resultant shortage of many building materials led to a huge rise in construction costs. Approximately 250% from 1998 to 2006. Prices were really crazy in 2005. Bids were absurd. A contractor I know who was willing to construct a nice house in 1998 for $117 sf, was asking for almost a thousand dollars a square foot in 2005 for similar construction.

Furthermore to get the big multi unit complexes built, developers often had to indulge the politicians ( most likely Democrats) fantasies. One very popular fantasy was that there was all of a sudden this huge market of young professionals willing and able to pay $600-750,000 for gritty, grungy, deconstructivist tiny urban loft condominiums and apartments in scary urban areas that were truly unsuitable for family living.

The democrats pushed this fantasy for two reasons: First, they could look ‘progressive” and hip for endorsing such hip solutions .
Secondly, they could avoid the ire of the single family communities and environmentalists that hate growth and particularly more traffic.

So now, LA has the worst of all worlds. Thousands of condo’s few people want at anything near the price they were built for. A devastated condo market, a devastated lower income housing market, and a market where still most people cannot afford to buy and also increasingly can’t afford to rent.

LA , the harbinger of many trends, went in exactly the opposite direction that most of the country the last few decades. 30 years ago it was primarily a city of homeowners. Now it is primarily a city of renters.

Many economist think that the housing market needs to return to historical affordability standards to repair the mortgage meltdown crisis. From what I know, I don’t see how replacement or new housing cost is going to allow a return to historical affordability. Costs even in these desperate times are way to high.

Luckily, it reproductive abilities are severely restricted and it is slated for a dustbin of history. Only unpleasant thing is that our kids would have to deal with the manure this creature produced before dying out.