Wrong Size House in the Wrong Location
There is a lot of loose talk by 12.5 Percenters about how the ‘housing crisis’ is all about California and Nevada.
Today’s numbers: Virginia underwater mortgage rate is 19.6 percent. That is about one in five.
As luck would have it, Virginians are Over-housed. There is plenty of room for second and third dwellings in well located structures.
And there is plenty of room for chickens and goats in the walk-out basements of McMansions on one, two, five and ten acre lots that the 12.5 Percenters love.
The data shows a pattern: the more dysfunctional the settlement pattern, the higher the rate of underwater mortgages.
Good locations are still holding their own because even if the borrower is “subprime,” the dwelling is not and ‘someone’ always needs a dwelling in a good location.
If Agencies and Enterprises had started to allocate the fair, equitable cost of location-variable expenses when the problem was first articulated and the data was first available (BEFORE the 2000’s bubble) then the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis would not have become the ‘housing crisis’ that led to the Global Financial Meltdown.
You could have read all about it on the Original Bacon’s Rebellion.
EMR
