Bill Lucy: Housing crisis regional, generational
USA Today talks to ex-city planner Bill Lucy about when the housing market might recover. "The geography of this is important," Lucy says, pointing out that half of all foreclosures last year were filed in just 35 counties across 12 states. As a result, it could take the Northeast and the Midwest until 2012 to recover, whereas Virginia could see a turnaround in the first half of 2010. But Lucy says the age group that usually buys new homes (30-44) is shrinking. Since 2004, the number of household in that age group has fallen by 1.6 million. Across the country, the article says, 1 in 9 homes are sitting empty. Between 2002 and 2007, busy builders like Ryan Homes increased our housing stock by 8.65 million, while the number of households increased by only 6.7 million.
4 comments
"There is an excess of 1.3 million units, not including vacation homes", according to the USA Today article--any guess how many vacation homes will go begging ?
According to the Virginia Housing Development Authority, Gen Y (and some older folk) are priced out of buying a house in the Charlottesville Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes the City, County, and several surrounding Counties. That's not really surprising data.
The VHDA also says that the Cville/Alb area will continue to face rising foreclosures from loans made at all price points, into the future. This, in addition to the oversupply of houses, condos and townhouses that are currently for sale, plus a very slow market (sales in the First Quarter 2009 were down 50% from last year) will make it longer for this part of VA to find its bottom. (There's lots of hope on the part of industry workers for a good Spring.)
Much more info on our blog. Va Housing Development Authority economic graphs and data here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13671313/CAAR-Conference-VHDA-Economic-outlook
Not sure where Bill Lucy gets his data, but Florida and California have foreclosure situations far worse than the rest of the country. People don't seem to realize that the pain the rest of the country is feeling has been in progress in Florida for about 4 years now.
According to Realty Trac, today there are almost 1.8 million homes in foreclosure. 260,000 of them are in Florida, and 430,000 are in California. That's 40% of active foreclosures in two states. And he's worried about the Northeast and Midwest? For real?
By the way, they show Virginia with fewer than 29,000 foreclosures currently.
Unfortunately, it is not clear how many of the homes are "new" construction and how many are "replacement" construction. I wonder also how many existing homes have been lost or are no longer marketable.