"Why Housing Will Come Back"
"Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Matthew J. Festa, a Land Use Prof Blog editor and an Associate Professor of Law at the South Texas College of Law, reveals some light at the end of the real estate tunnel today when he breaks down an essay from the New Geographer blog by Joel Kotkin, a Distringuished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in Orange, CA and an adjunct Fellow at the Legatum Institute in London, UK, into some of its essential elements. Mr. Kotkin's essay is entitled Why Housing Will Come Back, and here is a taste:
Yet for all the problems facing the housing market, homeownership – not exclusively single-family houses – is not likely to fade dramatically for the foreseeable future. The most compelling reason has to do with continued public preference for single-family homes, suburbs and the notion of owning a “piece” of the American dream. This is why that four out of every five homes built in America over the past few decades, notes urban historian Witold Rybczynski, have less to do with government policy than “with buyers’ preferences, that is, What People Want.”
(New Geographer, 14 September 2010, emphasis added.)
Mr. Festa's blog entry is entitled Kotkin: Why Housing Will Come Back.
Thanks to both Mr. Kotkin and Mr. Festa for helping to reorient us from what got us into this real estate mess and toward where we may be headed. In the above-quoted words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
