Housing
I heard it on the radio again today. Concern that the median price of housing is going down. Sales are up they say cheerfully, but prices are down they say glumly. What they fail to get is that house prices are still too high, and that prices need to come down a lot so that people will actually be able to afford housing, and afford to live in it and invest in making it greener.
We got ourselves into this big mess or a recession partly due to over use of natural resources, leading to ecosystem collapse, and partly due to the pumping up of housing prices as a way to create yet more wealth for Wall St when there was nothing else they could do, partly due to ecosystem collapse. House prices could be manipulated, the entire housing market could be manipulated, and folks were taught that house prices will rise forever, so buy NOW, even if you can not afford it, you can always refinance later, borrow against the ever rising value of the house, etc etc. The whole bill of goods.
This effort to raise house prices just feeds back into the Wall St craziness. The speed up of society to make up for the loss of community. The need to keep feeding growth so past debts can be repaid.
But the reality is that most Americans can not afford decent housing under these conditions. They pay prices that put everything at risk only because the alternative is sleeping under a bridge. It is time for the news media to realize the propaganda they are being fed and to understand that only if house prices continue to sink shall we be able to put our nation’s house in order and match economy and ecology properly. If we continue to create monetary value that is unshackled from the real economy, we continue our downward spiral of ecological collapse followed by greater poverty.