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James Surowiecki asks a question I have also asked (and that Dan Gross has long been pondering): What did the housing bubble give us? He reaches a conclusion similar to my own, though I picked on Las Vegas instead of Phoenix:
The housing bubble was unique, and uniquely awful. Each of the previous waves had come in response to a profound shift in the real economy. With the housing bubble, by contrast, there was no meaningful development in the real economy that could explain why homes were suddenly so much more attractive or valuable. The only thing that had changed, really, was that banks were flinging cheap money at would-be homeowners, essentially conjuring up profits out of nowhere. And while previous booms (at least, those of the twenties and the nineties) did end in tears, along the way they made the economy more productive and more innovative in a lasting way. That’s not true of the past decade. Banking grew bigger and more profitable. But all we got in exchange was acres of empty houses in Phoenix.
But wait: On her blog, Megan McArdle calls this analysis too full of “a sort of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning”—bloggin’ in Latin!—and that we still don’t know what the benefits of the housing bubble will be. Ezra Klein says that if we didn’t spend the money on housing, we probably would have wasted it on something else. And Ryan Avent adds levels of complication about exchange rates and global trade imbalances and deficit spending. I will not attempt to summarize.
All I can say is this: If one benefit of the bursting of the bubble was supposed to be reasonable prices for houses in places where people may actually want to live, then I'm not seeing it. Not yet anyway. And yes, we're still looking.
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I was not impressed with this
house. And when she looked at it in February, neither
was Nora. It was a foreclosure special, and even though it was cheap
relative to the neighborhood, it needed work. So we moved on, though I made a
mental note to keep track of what happened to the place. If it sold for more
than list ($629,900), I figured, then this market was still seriously out of
whack.
I learned last month that not only did it sell for more than
list price—it sold for 25 percent more than list price. (See also this
site.) What kind of madness was this? Then I noticed the sale price—$789,000—was about what the property was assessed for. I chalked
it up to my ignorance and inexperience as a first-time would-be homebuyer.
Maybe the bank was obligated by its fiduciary duty to its shareholders to
accept nothing less than assessed value on its houses. There was probably a
provision to this effect in the TARP legislation. Tim Geithner drives a hard
bargain.
Which was a ridiculous thought—I have a fair amount of
those—because the bank wouldn't have offered it for less than its
assessed value if it couldn't have accepted less than its assessed value. What was
going on here?
The mystery only deepened when I learned—just today! (thanks, Frank)— that the house sold
for $651,000. (See also this site.) What happened to the earlier sale? Did someone buy it again? A check of the
public record (you have to type in the address) shows only the earlier
sale, from February.
Maybe the earlier price was a mistake. Maybe the later one is. Maybe there has been a glitch
in the D.C records-keeping department. Maybe, hard as it may be to believe, I
have uncovered a
mistake on the Internet. Undoubtedly, there are things I do not know about the foreclosure process.
Oh well. It was near the top of our price range and needed a lot of work, so we weren't going to buy this house anyway. So no non-buyer's remorse for us. We'll save that for houses we could actually have afforded.
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Sorry for the long delay in posting. To answer the question many of you—OK, several of you—have been asking: No, we haven’t yet bought a house. We almost did. (This one, if you’re interested. And this one was also tempting.) And we’re getting closer. But we remain renters.
Part of the issue, obviously, is that we haven’t found a place we’ve both liked enough to want to spend most of our life savings on. But part of the issue is also, I admit, a lack of urgency (mostly on my part).
(On mine, too. I’m happy with our apartment, our neighbors, our friends here. I like apartment living—being able to leave our door open and run down the hall to feed our neighbor’s fish or have that very same neighbor watch Joe while I’m running home from work. So what if the people upstairs use their exercise machine at 9 p.m.?—Nora)
Note I did not say a lack of desire: We’d like a bigger place, and will need one, and it makes sense for us, at this point in our lives, to buy. We have a pretty good idea of what we want, both in terms of house and neighborhood. We have savings. We have loan approval. We have a lawn-care catalog.
So what are we waiting for, you ask. (And if you’re a realtor, you don’t so much ask as shout it.)
A few reasons. One, prices are continuing to fall, and I don’t think we’re hurting ourselves by waiting. (Though I don’t think we’ll wait until 2010, despite this forecast.) Two, as Nora said, we like our current neighborhood, and we certainly can’t afford to buy here. But we can enjoy the sidewalks. Three, and most important, we have to find a place that all of us feel comfortable in.
(Michael, you might as well fess up: By the time we get into this place, there will be four of us.—Nora)
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When we wrote this headline, we were just kidding. But now President Obama has gone and pretty much taped an infomercial—complete with exhortations to visit his Web site—telling people what a good deal they can get if they refinance their mortgage. Low rates! Great service! Millions of satisfied customers! Actually, he didn't mention anything about great service, but since it's the federal government, you can count on it.
I'll let Dana Milbank expound on the political implications of all this. My only point is to note that the president refers to your house as "your single biggest investment," which it usually is, unless you're someone like Bernie Madoff, in which case you've got bigger problems (and more houses).
Obviously the president hasn't been spending much time lately with real-estate agents and doesn't realize that this think-of-your-house-as-an-investment line is no longer in the script. If I had a dollar for every time I've been at an open house and been told to think of it not as an investment but as a place to live—well, we'd have enough for a much bigger house. I realize that a house is not only an investment. Like a car or a box of breakfast cereal, it has a value all its own, separate from its monetary worth.
I also realize that it's the job of realtors to get people to buy houses. And in a declining market, property is not a good investment, at least for the short term. We weren't in the market a few years go—it may not seem like it, but we've been looking for only a few months!—but I imagine the sales pitch then went something like this: Don't think of this as a place as where you're going to live for the rest of your life—think of it as investment! And in a few years you can sell and move up.
Of course, neither perspective is entirely wrong. It's a matter of emphasis. Maybe buyers back in the boom years should have heard more advice like what we're hearing today. And maybe we ought to listen more when we're told not to think of a house as an investm... Nah. We should still think of our house as our biggest investment and as a place to live. Because that's exactly what it is.
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This study has been getting a lot of attention. Christopher Crowe, an IMF economist, suggests that evangelical Christians may have helped soften the impact of the housing bubble and bust in some areas. Their "strict interpretation of Biblical injunctions with respect to money and greed might make them less prone to speculative excess," he writes. While the rest of us pagans and heathens were buying or refinancing with five/one interest-only ARMs with prepayment penalties, evangelicals were making their payments on their 30-year-fixed mortgages, trimming their hedges, and waiting for the Rapture. (I simplify. But only slightly.)
One of the reasons evangelicals help smooth out the bumps in the economy, apparently, is that—like movies or Manhattan psychiatrists—evangelicals are countercyclical. To help illustrate this point, Crowe examined home sales in evangelical and nonevangelical areas just before and after 9/11, and found that prices rose in areas with relatively more evangelicals and fell in areas with relatively fewer. "This is consistent with the view that non-evangelicals viewed the attacks as bad economic news with negative implications for house prices," he writes, "while evangelicals may have been prompted by their ‘end times’ beliefs to interpret 9/11 in a more positive light, boosting their overall sentiment and leading to an uptick in prices."
Being neither an economist nor an evangelical, I don't know what to make of all this. I get the part about rapturous evangelicals seeing 9/11 differently. What I don't get is why this would cause home values to rise. If you think the world is about to end, you don't buy a house. You don't sell a house. You just sort of sit around and ... actually, I don't know. What do you do when you think the world is about to end? This is a question for another blog.
On the other hand, and from a purely selfish standpoint: If there are any evangelicals out there looking to quickly and cheaply unload a three-bedroom, two-bath house within walking distance to the subway in advance of the Rapture—by all means, let us know.
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Maybe it's because of my job, maybe it's because of my upbringing, maybe it's because of my heritage, but anything or anyone described as "earnest" immediately arouses my suspicion. So when the topic of "earnest money" came up last week, I was not favorably inclined.
Earnest money is basically cash that you give to your real estate agent to show sellers how serious—excuse me, how "earnest"—you are about buying their house. Your agent then hangs on to it until the deal either closes or falls through. If it closes, it's put toward your purchase. If it falls through, you get it back. Theoretically. The law varies, but if the deal falls through for reasons not spelled out in your contract, the seller can keep your money even though you don't get the house.
There are other ways to show earnestness (the amount of your offer, the size of your down payment, a heartfelt note hand-delivered to the sellers). But, in homebuying as with wedding gifts, people generally like money. So the question, essentially, is this: How earnest a buyer are you?
With this house, I can tell you exactly: We were prepared to be 1 percent earnest. With an asking price of $638,000, this is not an insubstantial amount of earnestness. Besides, as far as I can tell—in real estate as in life!—there is no agreed-upon standard of earnestness. Sometimes earnest money is a percentage of the asking price; sometimes it's just a few hundred or thousand bucks.
But our Realtor was aghast. Our offer wouldn't be taken seriously, she said. But what about our offering price, I asked. What about our proposed down payment? What about this contract we are prepared to sign? What about this essay Michael wrote in high school about the dignity of work as portrayed in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, which he is prepared to fax to the sellers? [That essay sounds awfully earnest to me!—Nora.]
The one thing we were not prepared to do was to be 4 percent more earnest, which is what our Realtor suggested. Maybe we were wrong. And I understand that the seller wants assurance that the buyer is serious and will see the transaction through. But this argument seems to ignore the presence of a contract. If you sign an offer, which protects and obligates both parties, then what's the purpose of "earnest money"?
I'll tell you: It has no purpose. Sellers, with the encouragement of Realtors, extract it simply because they can. And because they have been working this way for decades, maybe even centuries. I wonder how much earnest money Abe Lincoln had to pay to get this place.
All this said, I concede that this position is not entirely rational. After all, if we really want the house, and if all the conditions we spell out in the contract are met, what does it matter? We can just subtract the earnest money we pay now from the down payment we plan to make later. What's a few thousand (or tens of thousands) bucks among friends (or parties to a contract)?
Well, I'm not there yet. I may have to be irrational about this for a while. Earnestly irrational.
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It has been more than a week since our last posting/confession, so please forgive us for the absence. Where have we been? Pondering making an offer on this house. Debating our real estate agent about the various components of this offer. Pondering again. Talking to lenders about this offer. (OK, Michael did that.) In the end, we made no offer on this house. It’s now under contract to someone else.
Michael: And we’re OK with that. At least I am. This man has never led me astray, and he says I should always be prepared to walk away from a deal.
Nora: This is a great house. Am I sad we won’t be living in it? A little. But I would be sadder living there knowing we’d overpaid for it, and $638,000 is too much for what we’d be getting. Could we have gotten it for less? Possibly—we’ll know when the sale price becomes public. But given the signals we were getting from our Realtor (which were about as reliable as our own intuition), we weren’t going to get it for the amount we were prepared to offer. We’ll keep an eye on how this one pans out. If we’re proved wrong, and the house goes for $600,000 or less, well, we’ll have learned a lesson. Though I’m not sure what. ... Not to not listen to a Realtor?
Michael: Three points. One, “overpaid” is a loaded term. The market will bear what the market will bear. If someone is willing to pay $638,000 for a house and we’re not, that doesn’t necessarily mean they overpaid. It just means they wanted it more. Two, sometimes the market will bear a lot of foolishness. And I think we both agree that this market is still pretty foolish. And three—always my clincher!—it doesn’t matter. We can make the argument, based on any given house’s rental value or replacement cost, that it is overpriced. But where does that get us?
Nora: I was feeling glum and frustrated when Michael passed along the uplifting news that we could get a loan for 3.99 percent. I guess this is what people mean when they say, “Money is cheap right now.” Money is never cheap to me!
Michael: There is some fine print, but we can probably get the rate. Money we don’t have, burning a hole in our pocket—this is what 2005 must have felt like. But I resist the notion that, just because we can get it, we should spend it. I also resist the compliments that accompany a good credit score. I feel like that character in a spy novel who has been secretly monitored for the whole book and at the end the bad guys tell him he’s OK, and he’s supposed to be grateful for the compliment, but really he’s mad that they’ve had him under surveillance all this time. I have been reading too many spy novels lately.
Nora: But while rates may be going down, prices in desirable areas are not. A three bedroom with no backyard on a busy corner for $669,000? A two-bedroom Cape for $725,000? Are the lower rates meant to encourage people like us to buy overpriced houses—yes, a squishy term, but I’m using it anyway—simply because our payments would be easier to handle? Isn’t that what got us all into this mess in the first place?
Michael: My own personal barometer of the bubble is this house, a “foreclosure special” that is sagging and peeling and needs a lot of work. Yet it sold for an astounding 25 percent above the asking price. I don't know the details, and they could change my assessment, but for now I look at this place and think: The bubble is dead. Long live the bubble.
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Nora: Hey Michael, as I was putting together our itinerary for this weekend’s open house visitations, I noticed this house, which practically screams, “motivated seller”! Just think, for a few thousand dollars more (just as I wrote that I thought, This
is what buying real estate does to you: You start to toss off phrases
like “a few thousand dollars more” as if you’re talking about pocket
change) we could have eight more bedrooms than we’d have in the beloved green house.
What would we do with 12 bedrooms and 4.5 baths? I smell a family
reunion … or a bed-and-breakfast. Either way, I smell a lot of pancakes!
Yes,
it’s on a main street. Yes, it’s way too big for us. But it’s hard to
resist the temptation to look at a house that’s going for $261,000 less
than what the current owners paid just two years ago.
Michael:
But the point isn’t how much the seller paid for it—it’s what we can
afford! And we can’t afford $700,000 for a house, even if it comes with
12 bedrooms and all the pancakes you can eat. Though I have to say, if
it ever comes down to a decision between two similar houses, each with
pluses and minuses but one that features free pancakes, I would choose
the one with free pancakes. I would also accept free waffles.
Nora:
True enough, but if they're willing to knock off $100,000 from their
original asking price, if we wait long enough, maybe they'll knock off
another $100,000. There I go again, tossing off big numbers
nonchalantly!
Michael: You’re right that there are some pretty drastic reductions out there. In
most cases, alas, the biggest discounts are for houses that
we can’t afford or
aren’t really even houses.
But I am not sure we have yet hit bottom. Not that I care too much—like
I said, we can afford what we can afford, and trying to time the
real-estate market strikes me as about as foolish as trying to time the
stock market. But banks and lenders do care, because all this price
uncertainty can make it
hard to appraise a house. Which is important, as we are learning.
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Nora and I did see a few houses last weekend, about which more later. In the meantime, here are a few odds and ends I have come across. I will try not to get too technical.
—Thought experiment: You have been saving for more than a decade to buy a house. When you finally start looking, however, even though you're in the midst of one of the greatest real estate busts ever, the housing market still seems ludicrous. In fact, in most cases it's still cheaper to rent. Meanwhile, the stock market has crashed and is at historic lows. Do you take the money you have been saving for a house and put it in the market? Keep looking for that house? Both? Or just buy an annuity from AIG? As usual, Felix Salmon's perspective is worth reading.
—Which leads to my second point: The price of a house is no reflection on its owner. It is simply a function of the market. I am surprised, as a first-time would-be homebuyer, at how emotional people get about the value of their house. (This is different from getting emotional about the house itself, which I completely understand, especially if you have lived in it for a long time.) It's a piece of property. It may not be worth as much as you would like it to be. That's OK. Most of your other possessions aren't, either. I know, I'm a buyer, I would say that. But really, it shouldn't be this hard for a real estate agent to tell his client that his "mid $300,000 range condo" is worth about $60,000 less than he thinks.
—I know you were joking, Nora—weren't you?—when you suggested we move a house from Washington to Pittsburgh, where it would be cheaper. But maybe you're on to something: Deborah Sarnoff and Robert Gotkin just moved a house, designed by Robert Venturi, no less, from the Jersey Shore to Long Island. And they only paid $1 for it. (Moving, of course, was extra.)
If anyone has a house they'd like to sell us for $1, even from an unknown architect, leave a note in comments, and we'll get back to you.
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Thank you for all of the diligent research you did last week, Michael. Unfortunately, the picture you paint is a not a very optimistic one: We shouldn't buy a house we can't afford (of course!), and the landscape of what we can afford (barring an unexpected windfall) won't be changing anytime soon. Add to that the thin inventory of houses in our price range and, well, I'm not feeling terribly hopeful.
Michael: Break out the violins! What's the name of that song?
Nora: Then along comes an intriguing listing: a five-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath house not far from our current apartment that has been reduced by $800,000. This is more than the asking price of every house we've looked at.
I know what you're thinking, Michael: Wait—is this house free? Well, not exactly. But its price has dropped more than $800,000 since it was first listed almost a year ago.
Of course we can't afford this house. But why not take a look anyway? If nothing else, it will give us a sense of what makes a house worth (a little more than) three times one in our price range.
Michael: I had two questions in mind. 1) Is this house really three times better/nicer/more valuable than this house? It is not even yellow. 2) Why do rich people get all the discounts? If houses in our price range start selling for 31 percent off, we could get this house for $662,000.
Nora: I felt a little awkward about going to this open house, knowing full well that we weren't going to buy the place. Should we pretend we're very serious, dress the part? (What do people who buy such houses look like, anyway? Do they even go to open houses?) I decided, no, we'd just be ourselves. I didn't even shower, and Joe was wearing his best $3 "Thomas the Tank Engine" T-shirt.
Michael: Can you believe she was actually worrying about what to wear to an open house? Unfortunately, as my tux was at the tailor, I had to wear my running stuff. My sneakers are relatively new.
Nora: From the front, this house looks like an average 1920s colonial. Very nice, yes, but not $2-million nice. Some of that value, no doubt, comes from the simple fact of its neighborhood, which is among the priciest in the city. Nearby houses have sold recently for more than $7 million. It's lovely over here: close to a Metro stop, near Rock Creek Park, in a good school district. These things cost money—lots of it!
Michael: I note here for the record that Joe's T-shirt got a compliment from the agent.
Nora: Once we stepped inside, it was clear that this was no ordinary 1920s colonial. The footprint of that house was there, yes, but it was barely recognizable. Everything had been opened up and gussied up with the finest of finishes. The kitchen had custom-made cabinets, two dishwashers, two sinks, and a fabulous window seat overlooking the main selling point of this house: an enormous landscaped backyard, complete with trampoline and swing set. Joe parked himself right there and began sucking his thumb with glee. (And I must mention, here, too, the powder room, where the toilet and sink were embellished with hand-painted leopards.)
Michael: I found that bathroom (note to Nora: We're not the kind of people who have "powder rooms") creepy. I do not want leopards, or anything else with eyes, painted on my toilet.
Nora: All of this was part of a huge renovation that was done about 20 years ago. It continued on the second floor, where the master bedroom featured a fireplace and large deck, and the master bath, decked out in marble, included a picture window and Jacuzzi tub that Joe thought was hilarious. (How come he doesn't get so excited when we turn on the bath at home?)
Michael: Joe clearly liked this place better than either of us did. It met almost all his requirements: Stairs? Check. Easily opened kitchen cabinets? Check. Jacuzzi faucets? Check. Private playground for intimate, catered play dates? Check. On a bus line? Uh ... sorry, buddy. But we can have the agent call Metro and see about rerouting the L1, 2, or 4. Anything to make a sale!
Nora: Walking through the rest of the second floor, I was reminded that this was once a small, plain house. The other bedrooms and an office were tiny compared with the lavish addition in back and looked a lot more like those in the $600,000 houses we're used to looking at. There was also a large finished basement with its own kitchen, I assume to help with the cooking for a knockout party, since this was clearly not meant to be a mother-in-law apartment.
Michael: It did feel like we saw two separate houses. The bottom two floors fit together better than the top one. It's a question of taste and finances, I suppose: When you add on to a house, how much do you want people (including those who live there) to notice the difference between old and new? I guess Nora and I fall closer to the not-noticing end of the spectrum.
Nora: No question: This is a very nice house. Is it $1.9-million nice? I guess so. (In 2008, its improvement assessment was $1.5 million.) But if we picked up this house—and its yard, including the trampoline and swing set—and moved it, to say, Pittsburgh, or even five miles out in Takoma Park, what would its value be then?
Michael: That's a brilliant idea, Nora! Maybe we could move this house and find out.
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Like Mickey, I was struck by this fact: The median sales price of a house in Detroit is $7,500.
That figure comes from December. For the three months that ended in January, according to Trulia, the median sales price was $10,000. Slightly higher, but still shocking. The average listing price for a house in Detroit, according to Trulia, was $77,426 for the week ending Feb. 25. (All of these figures are for the city only.)
These two figures leave us with at least two possibilities. Either homebuyers are getting discounts of about 83 percent in Detroit, which seems unlikely, or the only houses selling are the ones that are very, very cheap. Trulia currently lists 399 houses for sale for less than $15,000 in Detroit. Which got me thinking: How many houses for that price in Washington? Exactly three.* The average listing price for Washington is $753, 241, while the median sales price is $349,865.
Two more numbers—the last two, I promise! Detroit's median household income (from a 2003 Census survey): $26,157. Washington's: $42,118.
I still believe real estate prices are too high in Washington. But that doesn't mean I wish for D.C. what's happening to Detroit.
*As several readers have pointed out, these properties are for rent, not for sale. So it appears there are no houses for sale for less than $15,000 in Washington.
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So, to answer my own question—should we buy a house we can't afford?—we now have our answer, Nora: No.
It was a silly question anyway. As you know, I am opposed to spending too much on many things, such as toys and computers and even boxes of cereal. It's not as if I was going to change my mind on something as big as a house. And now that the president has unveiled Operation Save Our Homes, we also know that the government isn't going to help us: You had to have bought your house before Jan. 1, 2009, to qualify.
Which makes sense. Otherwise, as I noted, there would have been a perverse incentive for people like us to buy more house than we could afford, in the hopes that the government would step in and make things more affordable. Of course, there have been perverse incentives to buy more house than you can afford for most of the last decade, but that's another story. As the president says, we need to look forward, not back.
The one thing I will say about Operation SOH (note: not its real name; it's called HASP) is that it is as complicated as it needs to be. Possibly more. On the government Web site that attempts to explain it all, there is a series of questions that start out simple enough—"Is your home your primary residence?"—and end up purely speculative: "Do you believe that the amount you owe on your first mortgage is about the same or less than the current value of your house?" There's no way to give a solid answer to this question, really, though this site will help. Maybe the best answer is, "I'm not sure. Make me an offer and let's find out."
The questionnaire is designed to funnel you into one of two programs, though in both cases the government ends up recommending that you gather up as much paperwork as you can find and call your lender. By Monday, I predict most will have phone trees already set up: If you can't afford your mortgage and would like to refinance, press 1. If you have already refinanced and would like to negotiate a lower payment, press 2. If you lost hundreds of billions of dollars in the real estate market in the last five years though your own greed, corruption, and stupidity, and would like government assistance to help you avoid bankruptcy, please press 0 and ask to speak to Secretary Geithner.
There is also a sad little Web page where you end up if it is determined that you don't qualify for any federal assistance. This plan "will not help everyone," it says, though you can always call "a HUD-approved housing counselor" to find out just how screwed you are. "In certain cases," it reads, "you may need to sell your home and move to more affordable housing."
I have an idea, Nora! How about we move into affordable housing to begin with?
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No houses today, I'm afraid. Just a chart:
I mentioned this chart the other day, reproduced here with Robert Shiller's permission. (It's from the second edition of his book Irrational Exuberance.) I like this chart mostly because it confirms my own experience, which is to say that it shows with national data dating to 1890 what I have observed anecdotally in Washington since last month: The housing market is irrational. The correlation between home prices and interest rates, population, or building costs is very weak. And though prices have fallen a lot since their 2006 heyday, they still have a ways to go. The bubble lives.
About this last point, prompted by reading Daniel Gross (shameless plug: you can get that book here, and his new book here), I have been wondering: What worthwhile legacy will the Great Housing Bubble of the Early 21st Century leave us with? The main legacy of previous bubbles, Dan writes, is infrastructure—both physical and mental. Not only do we have all this leftover stuff (telegraph lines, railroad tracks, Internet bandwidth), but all this stuff helps us think in new ways. (Why send a letter when I can send a telegram? Why ship these crates by barge when they can get there faster by train? Why waste money at the Brookstone in the mall when I can waste it at brookstone.com?)
With the housing bubble, the legacy is less obvious. Yes, there are a lot of empty houses in America, and they're getting cheaper. And as Dan says, the housing bubble has changed the way Americans think about debt and real estate. First we learned that if we used our house as collateral, we could borrow money more cheaply. Now we're learning that if we used our house as collateral, we could lose our house.
To which I say: Is that it? Maybe we're too close to the bubble to know how it will help us. But unlike bandwidth or telegraph transmission lines or (to a lesser extent) railroad tracks, real estate is not a national resource. Thanks in part to mistakes made by now-bankrupt telecom companies in Mississippi and California, I enjoy relatively cheap Internet access in Washington. I get no benefit from the mistakes made by overzealous developers in Miami or Las Vegas.
Unless, of course, we move. How about it, Nora? You don't like the cold anyway, and I am beginning to think that America's bust will prolong Washington's bubble.