Recent Blog Posts
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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
Apr 27 20098:04am EDT -
Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
Apr 26 200910:04am EDT -
Be Your Own Counterfeiter
Apr 26 20099:04am EDT -
Being Tim Geithner
Apr 25 200912:04pm EDT -
Notes From a Press Conference Naif
Apr 25 20099:04am EDT -
What Good is the News?
Apr 25 20098:04am EDT -
Stressful Enough
Apr 24 20092:04pm EDT -
Not Regretting the Pound
Apr 24 20091:04pm EDT -
Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
Non-Economic Questions of the Day
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
The Stress Test Blind Alley
Apr 24 20098:04am EDT -
Happy Hour
Apr 23 20099:04pm EDT -
Recovery Without Rebalancing
Apr 23 20096:04pm EDT -
The Shape of Your Recession
Apr 23 20095:04pm EDT
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More on Detroit Housing
When I said yesterday that the median house price in Detroit was less than $10,000, Matt, in the comments, quite reasonably doubted the stat:
That just does not pass any kind of smell test. $8,500 for a house or a condo? I know Detroit's not the loveliest town in the world but even there that's got to be, if not a misprint, then seriously misleading.
I asked the ever-resourceful David Sunstrum to look into this, and it seems that the stat is really true. Here's a nice-looking 3BR, 1,557 sqft house for $10,000: that's about $6.42 per square foot. If you don't have that kind of money, here's a $1,000 house, and here's a $500 house. Says David:
There are about 180 homes on realtor.com alone that are for sale for at or below $1,000 (that's not a misprint), with some for a few hundred. The common theme is that these homes either need serious work... The huge wave of foreclosures in Detroit has left banks owning loads of properties that they want to get off their balance sheets, at any price.
Remember that in many ways a house is a liability rather than an asset: the owner needs to pay taxes on it, put effort into trying to sell or rent it, etc etc. Houses can and do go to zero, if they're in neighborhoods with more supply of housing than there is demand for it.
