I find studies like this to be fascinating:
The continuing economic downturn has drastically altered the internal migration habits of Americans, turning the flood of migrants into the Sun Belt and out of states like New York, Massachusetts and California into a relative trickle, an analysis of recent federal data confirms.
Essentially, millions of Americans have become frozen in place, researchers say, unable to sell their homes and unsure they would find jobs elsewhere anyway.
An analysis of new data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire confirms earlier census assessments of a migration slowdown, but also offers a deeper, state-by-state look at the impact of this shift, which upends, however temporarily, a migration over decades from the snowy North to the sunny South.
The institute’s study compared three years’ worth of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which was released early Thursday and covered 2008-10, with the data from 2005-7. Since the survey’s findings are released in three-year increments, this was the first time that researchers had a set of data that included only years since the financial collapse began, allowing them to make a direct comparison to a similar period before the collapse.
Using this and other data from the I.R.S. that many researchers consider even more comprehensive, they found that migration into formerly booming states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada began to slow as soon as the recession hit and continued to shrink even into 2010, when many demographers expected it to level off. At the same time, Massachusetts, New York and California, which had been hemorrhaging people for years, and continued to do so in the three years before the financial collapse, suddenly saw the domestic migration loss shrink by as much as 90 percent.
What I think is most interesting is that Nevada and Florida were two of the states hit the hardest by the real estate bubble. How much of the pre-recession growth was chasing bubble money? And I guess the bigger question is how does this all play out- it is hard to “Go where the jobs are” if you are permanently stuck with a house you can’t sell and can’t afford to abandon.
AA+ Bonds
OWS = America
BGK
Um, all of it? Not just real estate growth, but job growth as well. Where I live, in southwest Florida, tourism is more oriented toward seasonal residents than transients. We do have beaches, but most are attached to condos or higher-end hotels. There’s no attractions of any significance. Which is why nearly all of the post-2000 job growth was in the building trades, banks, real estate, and mortgage servicing, and not so much tourism. There was some attendant growth in hospitality and luxury goods businesses as the condo-flippers felt flush enough with fake cash to throw it around. Current unemployment is 11.1%, up from 3% in 2006. That’s down from a 14%+ high, which I attribute to out-migration and people just dropping off the job search.
Also, those of us who were long-term residents, and were used to the typical 3/2, 2200-square-foot house on a quarter acre going for maybe $150,000 as late as 2004, and condos being mostly a lower-cost alternative, wondered who was actually going to live in all those bubble-built million-dollar golf course fake-Tuscan “palazzos” and $750000 “condo-maximums.” That would be no one.
Corner Stone
Go to North Dakota. That’s Brian Williams on NBC’s advice. If you’re a family that’s down and out you just need to be willing to relocate to ND.
Said so today to Chuckles Todd during a promo for his new Rock Something Something show premier.
Chris T.
@Corner Stone: Yep, because 6 million unemployed people relocating to North Dakota won’t put any strain whatsoever on North Dakota. :-)
cathyx
@Corner Stone: Too bad North Dakota is where it is.
JGabriel
@Corner Stone:
Don’t forget to bring a wood chipper and unguent.
.
WereBear
You can’t burn wood for air conditioning.
Expect the “frying pan” states to lose more population over high electricity rates, too. A few years ago, when I went back to Florida after a couple of decades hiatus, the streets were like a remake of Omega Man.
Unlike the natives, who relied on deep porches and “ice tea” that is way too sweet, the people who live there now rely on a/c.
Corner Stone
@Chris T.: Hey, some mayor there they interviewed said every time a job is filled there it’s like 1.5 new ones open up. So, according to ND math, ipso chango. Done.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
And there’s the fact that the unemployment rate is lower in NY and MA than in here in Texas, and if you were to come to this wonderful state, you’d probably end up working in fast food unless you had an advanced degree. I would consider moving out if I could get rid of my house and find another job.
RossInDetroit
@WereBear:
True. The south generally has much higher than average electricity consumption. Cheap power basically made modern urban life possible in the hot states more than in the rest of the country.
wilfred
“Lots of folks back East they say, is leavin’ every day…
Over is it? Movement and modernity went hand in hand – vide “The Grapes of Wrath”; even “The Great Gatsby” is fascinated with movement – physical, and abstract.
Stasis indicates the failure of modernity, and its handmaiden, capitalism.
freddie
North Dakota right now looks like some kind of “Blade Runner” promo. Its all tore up, wells have huge flames burning off the extra gas, and there are 4000 trucks racing in every direction.
Goog Times for all!!
JCT
@Corner Stone: Just wait until the first real pangs of winter hit…. talk about a shocker.
amk
Yay, ron paul’s ‘let build a fence all around to keep us inside’ is working already. Just imagine how much more ron could accomplish as the prezinent.
RossInDetroit
Three years ago it looked like the whole auto industry could fail, and we were 7 years into a 30 year house note.
To say nothing of the 2.2M other people in the area, where much of the economy relies on auto-related manufacturing.
If the Big Three had gone down SE MI would look like a ghost town with patches of Calcutta slums.
jon
Foreclosures in Arizona and Nevada are all over the place. I’m actually looking in Tucson, and there are tons of homes at fire-sale prices. And they’re crap even at low prices.
California, with a higher unemployment rate, has a different problem: the banks want to make a profit from those houses. Those banks aren’t foreclosing as often there because those same banks don’t want to let that market go down in value there. Those houses might make the banks’ money back, since California is California. The crap that was built in a rush for the Arizona and Nevada markets was on otherwise-useless land. There’s no reason for the banks to care about that. Arizona is the place where the losses will be realized, while California real estate is what the banks want to hold on to.
The more I see about the home market, the happier I am to not own one. The market was unsustainable before, with high prices and low wages in this area. The idea of an investment got people to buy. It was greed on top of greed, with some fraud thrown in for good measure. Now that the investment idea has been shown for what it is, these homes are being revealed as crap at any price.
At least buying gold is still a sure thing.
Cat Lady
Using HGTV as a lagging indicator, the home flipping shows have been replaced with how to negotiate short sales and REO properties with the banksters on one end of the scale, and the Selling New York to the banksters on the other.
Percysowner
@JCT: Eh, I’ve lived in Ohio all my life. I keep my house at 55 during the day and drop it to 50 at night. I have tons of already purchased robes,sweaters and blankets. Admittedly, I make up for all this frugality in the summer because I hate heat, but in actuality it is a lot easier to get warm with less fuel than it is to get cool.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: Has the mama kitteh found a home?
Reality Check
@RossInDetroit:
The auto industry will still fail and fail big time. The government just delayed the inevitable. Remember the FIRST Chrysler Bailout? We would have been better off if it went bankrupt in 1980, the pain would be over quicker and the free market could adjust.
Sunny Outlook
For some of us stationary northerners, it’s not that we’re afraid to move, it’s that we’re confident that Florida will sink under the waves while its weather comes to us: Global Warming, baby!
moonbat
@Reality Check: Laaaaaame
Chyron HR
@Reality Check:
Still listening to Rush “I hope America fails” Limbaugh, huh?
Culture of Truth
Speaking of which:
New York police and fire personnel removed gasoline cans and generators this morning from Zuccotti Park. The equipment, which has helped the protesters power computers and mobile phones and keep warm as temperatures dipped to near freezing, are safety hazards and unlawful and won’t be allowed back in the park.
Reality Check
@Chyron HR:
Just stating a fact. GM and Chrysler are eventually going to go bankrupt and the scraps will be picked up by the Chinese. Transplant automakers in the non-union south already build more cars–the #1 auto manufacturing state? Alabama!
geg6
Purely anecdotal, but I deal with young college students and recent grads every day and have for 20 years now. It used to be that we did everything we could to encourage them to leave the area to seek out employment and opportunity. And they listened and left in droves. That is no longer the case and hasn’t been for the last 5-7 years or so. And fewer leave or even want to leave.
It’s really been interesting the last few years to see all the people that fled Western PA back in the Reagan and again in the Bush years, as the steel and then airline industries flamed out here, come streaming back. I have run into at least a dozen people I went to high school and college with in the 70s and 80s who left in the mid-80s and are moving back now. And they are all people who moved to Florida, Arizona, and Nevada because they could get jobs. And now they’re back because they can get jobs.
Angelos
“house you can’t sell and can’t afford to abandon”
Strategic default. Make sure you have enough credit card room, dump the fucking house, and plan to rent for 5-6 years.
I know two families (one from Florida, one Arizona) who have done this. Massively underwater one homes, no way to catch up. It’s just a business decision, not an emotional one.
nodakfarmboy
@cathyx: If you can deal with cold (and you can- it just takes adjustment) it’s really a pretty decent place to live- as long as you stay in the east and central parts of the state. The far west is a social disaster right now. Too much growth, too fast. Jobs everywhere, but no housing. People living in their cars, and crime on the rise (from admittedly low base levels). It’s rough out there, and the system is strained.
In any case, feel free to join us up north. You might be surprised at what you find.
batgirl
Just heard on Nice Polite Republicans this morning that Whirlpool is closing a factory in the right-to-work paradise Arkansas.
Cacti
@jon:
The poster child for over-development in Arizona is the town of Maricopa, where dancing Bristol Palin bought her spread.
It was a dreary little desert outpost about 20 miles from the nearest Phoenix area suburbs, that some genius developer decided would be a great place to start building subdivisions.
joes527
@wilfred: Dude. Haiku is 5, 7, 5.
You are way over on the syllable count.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
There’s a generational social angle to this that often gets overlooked: the millenials and their Helicopter Parents. These kids don’t take a crap without first consulting with Mom and Dad and if the toilet is out of paper, they call them and ask “can you drive here with a roll?”
*All* of my friend who reproduced are now bearing the fruits of their hovering parenting skills: “leaving home” is defined as either moving into the basement of the house or living 10 minutes away.
Again, not a sole cause but one of many that results in people physically going nowhere fast.
Cacti
@nodakfarmboy:
That’s pretty much the problem with the “go to North Dakota” advice from the librul media.
How much immediate growth is a State with a population of 672,000 prepared to handle?
4dfb4nlcs
Here is the archived testimony of the economist who testified to the FCIC about the Nevada economy, with none of the nice pictures. As I read it, the shorter version was that growth in the Nevada economy was at one time real. But it was always dependent on tourism and construction and during the housing bubble these things became a trap for the economy there.
John, this is a Game 7–only the second in the infinite amount of time you have been blogging. I suspect that your public demands a World Series open thread clearly labelled as such. I will not be there because sunset is at approximately 6:05. I will let John Rooney and Mike Shannon take the season out.
(This is so unbelievable. You could not have told me this on Labor Day.)
PurpleGirl
@jon: Gold can also go down. There is no sure thing any more, if there ever was one.
@batgirl: In addition to the one they said they were closing after they got that $19 Million grant from the feds for energy efficient research? They got the grant and then announced they were closing a plant in Indiana and were building a new one in Mexico. Treasonous sons of bitches.
Corner Stone
Man, that damn smile by Herman Cain in his ad is just freakin’ creepy.
Liberty60
If there is onepositive thing that comes out of this Great Recession, my hope is that it will be to forever destroy the notion of middle class people thinking of themselves as real estate investors.
Millions of gullible people got conned into thinking they somehow were going to strike it rich by playing the real estate market, with the roof over their head as the gambling stake.
Real estate investing is one of the riskier gambles around, even in good times, and is a game for professionals.
The housing bubble was similar to any foolish adventure in that it cast side the notion of work and saving and thrift, and promoted the notions of risk, consumerism and greed.
In a world like that, of course the bandits made out like, well, bandits, while the flock got fleeced.
Culture of Truth
Inexplicably Brian Williams was on History Channel “The Story of Us.” I wanted to punch his smug face.
Culture of Truth
How long til Canada builds an ice wall on the Dakota border?
nodakfarmboy
@Cacti: On the east end of the state, we can handle it. Fargo and Grand Forks have the capability to handle expansion, given their size and infrastructure. The real problems are in the far west. The towns out that way were simply too small to absorb the human wave that’s enveloped them. Williston and Dickinson, the main cities of the far west, had about 15,000 people, and have been absolutely crushed trying to keep up with what’s happening around them. The smaller towns in the oil patch are probably worse. Small example: the small towns rely on volunteer ambulance crews, which worked when you had three calls a week. Now they get multiple calls a day, with oil worker injuries and vehicle accidents, and the system can’t keep up. They’ve also had to stop offering bus service for schoolchildren in some places- the oil companies simply offer too much money for truck drivers, and the school districts can’t compete on wages. Rents have also gone through the roof. Reports of one bedroom apartments going for 2000 a month are common, and I’ve heard talk that they are going for even more in some places. Note that before this hit, a one bedroom probably went for 300-500. Now people, particularly retirees on fixed incomes, find themselves facing San Francisco levels of rent.
People are openly beginning to discuss the need to slow things down. Which, given the national economy, is a bit mind-boggling. Where else could you say that right now?
Cacti
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Were you shaking your cane while you typed that?
bystander
This stuck phenomena was always going to be an expected consequence of the meltdown in the housing market. And, it is precisely at odds with this notion that people are expected to move to where the jobs are; axiomatically true for our economic system. The conundrum with a house to sell in a soft market, that is upside down in its loan to value, coupled with a job offer (to someone who may be currently unemployed) half way across the country, was the recipe for “jingle mail.” Except, anyone who just mails in their keys was a “deadbeat.” And, anyone who stays and loses their home in foreclosure, is also a “deadbeat.” That there was no solution to this system of equations is the reason and basis for “deadbeat.”
There are days when I think it was by design. But, the utter stupidity of this set up (eg, cram down would have been a much better attack strategy) suggests that our overlords are simply monumentally pig ignorant. We are witnessing an epic fail in any sense of meritocracy.
WereBear
I did two steps forward yesterday, driving through a snowstorm to get the paired kittens (always seen together since birth) to their new home with the cheezfriend. Where a cat tree was waiting, just delivered in its box.
I think they will be spoiled properly there. I do have an inquiry about Mum pending… waiting to hear further…
However, I did take one step back. Little orange boy is proving to be too Sensitive to handle a home with two big dogs and three kids with lots of friends. They will foster him, but he needs placement elsewhere:
Adorable orange guy needs a home!
He needs a quiet home, is all.
JCT
@jon:
I have noticed the exact same thing — I’m in the process of moving to Tucson and all I hear is “you’re going to end up with a palace out there” because my current home has largely held it’s value. But I am going insane trying to find something that I “want” to buy, folks in some of the nicer areas like the Catalina Foothills are still asking for ridiculous amounts of money, I’ve told my realtor to just forget about properties there. And the minute you fall below a certain pricing level the homes are ugly crap. Arizona is just a housing disaster.
Southern Beale
Just heard that Bank of America is ditching its $5 debit card fee plans after all of the negative reaction.
Haven’t seen a link anywhere yet though. It’s the “Netflix” rule! Customers are still the king!
singfoom
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I would caution against using anecdotal evidence of your friends children as being completely representative of an entire generation.
There are independent and dependent people in all generations, boomer, X and Y/Millenialls. I work with plenty of Millennials and I find them able to perform tasks by themselves.
Again, my anecdote is not evidence, just an anecdote that is the opposite of yours. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
PeakVT
At the same time, Massachusetts, New York and California, which had been hemorrhaging people for years
This is a little bit much for the news section of the paper. Yes, there has been net migration out. But the population of each state has been growing, and clearly this “hemorrhaging” hasn’t harmed the economies of those states relative to the states with net migration in. They explain the data in more detail in the 13th paragraph, but that’s seven down from where they say “hemorraghing.”
John X.
There are other subtler things that keep down mobility.
Firms have stopped paying for outside job candidates to come interview. It used to be that everyone got comped travel, hotel and food by the intervee. Now, that’s an “executive class” perk, with employees outsourcing the rest of the expense to prospective employees.
Likewise, firms have stopped paying moving expenses. It was a lot easier to relocate when the company is chipping in. Now, people literally can’t afford to scrape up the cash for three months rent plus security deposit (increasingly the new normal for renting) plus moving expenses. And that’s renting, which does not even get into the housing market issues.
And there’s the eternal problem of “in-state” tuition at public schools. The best way to get a job, period, is to go to school in a market with jobs and intern at a place that could conceivably offer a job for good work. Instead, you get people in depressed states going to college in depressed states and then entering their state’s mass of unemployed.
Shit’s turtles all the way down.
cmorenc
The history of the western U.S. is filled with towns that mushroom up from nothing in booms, and then ten to twenty years later go bust and shrink dramatically back, sometimes surviving in diminutive form, sometimes vanishing to ghost town form. Such will happen to much of the current North Dakota oil and gas boom towns.
Chris T.
@bystander:
We don’t have a meritocracy, especially not in the 0.1%.
TheMightyTrowel
@singfoom: the sky-high youth unemployment rate might also have something to do with the anecdata noted.
Cat Lady
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
At youngest daughter’s freshmen orientation in an auditorium full of parents we were asked how many of the kids did their own laundry, and literally me and two other mothers raised their hands. Scary.
Bill H.
Um, the pre-recession growth was bubble money. It was the proverbial self licking ice cream cone. There were jobs building houses in the Sunbelt so people moved there to get those jobs. But why were there jobs building houses in the Sunbelt? Because people moving to the Sunbelt to build houses in the Sunbelt were buying houses in the Sunbelt. And people moved to the Sunbelt to sell groceries to the people who were building thse houses, and truck drivers…
arguingwithsignposts
@nodakfarmboy: sounds like glibertarian paradise. Why are those moochers complaining? The invisible hand will be along any minute now to fix things.
Pat
The authors obviously haven’t been to Austin, which is adding 2,000 people every month (mostly from CA and WA,) recession be damned.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@nodakfarmboy:
I wonder what these places will look like in 10-15 years. Is this sustainable economic activity or simply another boom? If the latter, it’ll take the communities 5-7 years to build up infrastructure to support the population influx. Then at some point the boom ends and everybody leaves and the municipalities lose their tax base to support all that infrastructure.
@Cacti:
No but I was shaking my fist at a passing cloud.
Here in Flyover Country (remember “Appalachia is a state of mind”) the only time the kids go *any* distance from their parents is if they are “economic draftees” and enlist.
My friends are on either coast and their experiences mimic what I see, in general, around here. Parents don’t want their kids to go away and the kids don’t want to leave.
Again, it appears to be a social contributing factor, not *the* factor by any stretch.
Reality Check
Speaking of cold there is a massive snow storm headed for the Northeast as we speak. And it’s still October! Any Warmists want to chime in?
Rafer Janders
@John X.:
And people who haven’t already done an inter-state or cross-country move have no idea how much it can cost. If you’re a family and you want to bring your furniture and the accumulated contents of a 3-4 bedroom house, well, it’s going to cost you. A lot.
JPL
OT.. For a mental health break, I suggest visiting the NYTimes panoramas on the 15 new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art displaying 1200 works of Islamic culture. link
Articles like this make me happy that I still read the times. Of course, I skip bobo and chunky and half of their political analysis but they do know how to do the arts.
joes527
@Reality Check: Isn’t that cute? We are still unclear on the whole weather is not climate thing. Next time it rains I won’t be living in a desert any more I guess.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@John X.:
I work for a Federal agency that makes it clear that in order to be promoted, you *must* move around (we have offices in all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico). Until around 2005, my agency not only paid moving expenses, the agency bought your house or at least did something that minimized risk to employees willing to mover around in order to climb the career ladder. It really was a sweet deal not unlike how DoD handled military moves (not sure if they still do that).
Not anymore and you should hear the howling. The agency still unofficially requires that you move in order to be promoted but now “only” offers some moving expense support and then, not all of the time. Suddenly their applicant pool has dried up, I wonder why.
Reality Check
@JPL:
“Works of Islamic culture”? How many burkas and beheading booths can you display? Is there a special exhibit on suicide vests too?
Omnes Omnibus
@ singfoom: “What is truth?”
Corner Stone
@joes527: But today is the coldest day in October!
Refudiate that, buddy!
Reality Check
@joes527:
I’ll repeat: It’s freaking OCTOBER and we’re getting SNOW.
arguingwithsignposts
@Reality Check:
You’re an idiot.
Happy?
singfoom
@TheMightyTrowel: You mean, the inability to find a job coming out of college means people might move back into their parent’s house in order to save money to get a start?
Shocking, right?
We should judge them, harshly, because their experience is different than ours.
Reality Check
“WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE!” is said every single time it snows, but when there’s a fire in california it’s ZOMG TEH MOTHER EARTH IS TAKIN HER REVENGZE!!!!!! OH NOEZ!1!!! WE MUST SAKRIFICE TEH KOCH BROTHERS TO APPEAZE HER WRAAATH!!1111!11eleventy
singfoom
@Reality Check: Weather is not climate, you fucking tool.
Reality Check
@singfoom:
Except if there’s a drought in Texas, or a hurricane in Louisiana, or a wildfire in California, then it’s totally proof that AGW is REAL!!!!! and the High Priests of Warmism will demand we sacrifice to appease the wrath of the Goddess Mother Earth and her Prophet Al Gore.
arguingwithsignposts
@Reality Check:
Sure, right next to the iron maiden and rack “Works of Catholic Inquisition” exhibit. There’s even a special exhibit about priestly sexual abuse.
Reality Check
@arguingwithsignposts:
Good thing I’m an atheist.
arguingwithsignposts
@Reality Check:
What strawman is saying this?
Reality Check
@arguingwithsignposts:
Are you freaking serious?
soonergrunt
@Corner Stone: He looks like a character in a Steven King movie.
Rafer Janders
@Chris T.:
Actually, we do have a meritocracy, in the original sense of the word. British sociologist Michael Young coined the phrase in the 1950s in his book “The Rise of the Meritocracy”, and he actually meant it as a perjorative — it was his thesis that opening the system to those who would achieve on merit (as opposed to the more traditional English class-based system) would have the perverse effect of labelling those who did not achieve as being “without merit”, and therefore OK to be ignored. Or, in simpler terms, as he put it “Every selection of one is a rejection of many”.
I’ll quote from a recent editorial by Lord Young:
The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.
So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited. Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.
As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
Hoodie
@nodakfarmboy: Which is why this is the next malinvestment after the housing bubble, one that Rick Perry, among other Republicans, is pushing. Those oil and gas plays will last a decade or two at the most. Most of the jobs will dry up sooner as the fields mature, and they’ll leave behind an environmental mess and a bunch of unsustainable infrastructure. Building an economy on a non-renewable extractive activity is a game for idiots. Like the kind that are running for the Republican presidential nomination.
Reality Check
@arguingwithsignposts:
FFS start with this poster!
Remember, weather is not climate…except when it proves Warmism.
Paul in KY
@Cat Lady: I must say I did not do mine until I went off to college, way back in 1977. I was spoiled a bit by my mom/dad.
singfoom
@Reality Check: See, your problem is that you ascribe arguments that other people have made to people on this board, among other things. We are not responsible for other people’s arguments.
Global Climate Change is real. It is happening. It doesn’t mean that our weather cycles stop happening, you still get winter/spring/summer/fall.
It’s science. You don’t want to accept it? Fine. Your acceptance is not necessary, the science will continue to prove it without it.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Stop it MSNBC! Stop it!
Every damned time I walk back into the room that fracked Cain ad is just ending in a segment they’re doing.
Someguy
Look at the bright side of this. It stops the hemorrhage of people out of the rust belt states. Too bad it didn’t come before the 2010 census…
Reality Check
@singfoom:
Except back in 2000 Warmists were telling us that snow would be a thing of the past “within a very few years”.
Face it, you guys are just a more sophisticated version of “Reverend” Camping and his rapture predictions.
Rafer Janders
Um, people, stop replying to the troll. C’mon. Like a fire, it only burns with oxygen.
scav
@joes527: Well, he’s got Pat for company who seems to think that info on Austin refutes the overall study on migration. Variance must be a tougher concert than I thought. Apparently remembering even pre-existing past weather in October is tougher than I thought.
Anyway, thought I’d provide a link to info on some of the other banks that (rather astonishingly) didn’t jump onto the BofA debit fee bandwagon. R R CEOs lrning?
soonergrunt
@Reality Check: Global climate instability, as predicted by the climate scientists, and verified by anybody with half a brain, and misnamed global warming by press is a bitch, and you’re a fucking moron. There is no known link between the two.
@Reality Check: And I’ll repeat the words “climate instability” and “you’re a fucking moron.”
PurpleGirl
@Reality Check: The extremes will be more extreme.
It’s time to learn to crochet and/or knit blankets, sweaters and socks.
Reality Check
@PurpleGirl:
Really? Just like snowfall will be a thing of the past within a few short years?
D’oh! That’s right. That was written 11 years ago. I guess the Climate High Priests have received a new revelation from Mother Earth.
Rafer Janders
Once again: topic of this post is “Stuck in Place.” Discussions of increasing global weather instability can be had elsewhere.
Corner Stone
@Paul in KY: Say what?
singfoom
@Reality Check: Uh, I’m an atheist. So no, I’m not anything like “Reverend” Camping.
You know what the scientific method is? You make a hypothesis, you make observations based on that hypothesis, it may be supported or not. Eventually you come to a conclusion.
The fact that a scientific perspective on Global Climate Change has changed over time is only the scientific method moving forward as it is designed to do.
Given more data, the view evolves. Sorry that you can’t grok that. Again, none of the posters here are responsible for the research.
In addition, your link is about a trend, not an isolated incident, which is what you are pointing to to claim that weather = climate.
Please, stop embarrassing yourself.
joes527
@Reality Check:
This actually gets on my nerves too.
There always have been wildfires in California.
There always will be wildfires in California.
When the Santa Ana Winds blow, the only thing you can do with a wildfire is get out of its way, and wait for the winds to stop. Seriously.
The Santa Ana winds have blown in Southern California long before we started digging up dinosaurs to burn.
PurpleGirl
@arguingwithsignposts: LOL, written in giant banner-sized letters.
Reality Check
@singfoom:
No, you’re not an atheist, you’re a Warmist. You have your prophets, your high priests, holy books, and a goddess in mother earth. Hell, you even have indulgences in the form of carbon offsets.
AGW catastrophe is just the Upper East Side version of the rapture, where the US will simultaneously be flooded and also turn into a desert wasteland while we have giant blizzards all at the same time, or something, unless we turn with repentence towards the Earth Goddess and her Prophets.
Rafer Janders
Seriously, y’all should be ashamed of yourselves. Look at how easily you let a moron hijack the thread.
Pat
Climate deniers’ Luddism will be a quaint footnote as Texas lobbies to secure a pipeline to the Mississippi River in 2020.
scav
@Rafer Janders: Who appointed you net-nanny? All our best discussions of housing break out in hockey threads. It’s not exactly like there’s an idiocy season and we’re not allowed to slap down misinformation only after getting permits and in permitted threads. The breeding population is large enough — they’re nowhere near an endangered species.
gene108
@Liberty60:
Your joking right?
The American middle-class is a sucker for a get-rich-quick-so-I-can-tell-the-boss-to-shove-it-scheme.
The middle-class people I know that got burned in the housing crisis, were speculating. They were flipping homes, but then the one they bought before the market crashed just ended up burning them.
JPL
@arguingwithsignposts: The panoramas online are amazing and all except one comment was positive. The one negative commenter received a history lesson.
Nevgu
As usual, Wrong Again Cole masturbates over the prospect of cup half empty scenarios. Completely ignoring the Dow being over 12000, the positive GDP numbers, and the positive new housing starts.
But Cup Half Empty Cole never let good news get in the way of his doom porn.
Rafer Janders
@scav:
It’s an anarcho-syndicalist collective. In the absence of a repressive overlord, we all have to do our part.
Reality Check
@Nevgu:
Whistling past the graveyard of the Greater Depression, I see.
scav
@Rafer Janders: Fair enough. Just don’t be shocked that we don’t always immediately line up tidily but instead run around the playground screaming a bit more before we come in for cookies and naptime.
RossinDetroit
@JCT:
A friend moved to Phoenix, bought a new house and spent the next 5 years bringing it more or less up to the build standards of the 1940s MI farmhouse he grew up in. Nothing was level. Nothing was straight. No square corners. Walls weren’t flat. Inadequate plumbing, etc. He said it was pretty much the most minimal structure you could have made that would look decent from the street.
IrishGirl
Arizona was also hit very hard by the Housing Bubble and the reason was precisely because we had far too many investors (many of them non-local) buying up properties and the construction industry rabid to continue building new home no matter what anyone said. They were all chasing the “easy money”. It wasn’t until the Recession hit that I realized that we have too many homes…even with projected growth. People moving in wanted the newer homes out in the suburbs, so construction was crazy busy. But there were tons of older homes sitting empty. Now the number of older homes sitting empty has exploded because of the foreclosures AND there are a ton of new houses sitting empty because people stopped migrating.
But what are they doing in AZ about it? Nothing…they construction industry obviously shrunk and a ton of people were out of work…however they can’t wait to start building again. They’re begging for investors or somebody to help them start again. No one, not even our politicians (Jan Brewer, of course) are questioning the fact that we never needed that many houses in the first damn place. They’re all talking about how they can get the “new housing starts” to increase. I wish someone with some sense would slap them upside the head with the facts and make them deal with the crisis of foreclosing homes and filling in what we already have ready for occupancy.
So long as states like AZ depend on migration to keep their economy healthy, we will continue to experience this boom/bust cycle. Stupid is as stupid does.
trollhattan
@Reality Check:
Did they just up your pay per post from a nickle to seven cents? ‘Cause I’ll pitch in a dime for you to STFU and go waste people’s time somewhere else. I hear redstate’s really nice.
beltane
@trollhattan: I think they cut his pay, thus accounting for the increase in postings. Like all American workers, Reality Check is finding he has to work twice as hard just to break even.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Every fourth house in our neighborhood has been on the market since 2008. None of them have moved.
We weren’t crazily overvalued, but nevertheless values have dropped to the point where nobody can sell without taking a bath (if we tried to sell today, we’d lose on the order of $20K, although we’re not yet underwater; even with the loss, it’s still worth more than what we owe).
Nobody can sell because nobody can buy because nobody can sell. I’ve had nibbles of job opportunities out of state (the job market for greybeard code monkeys is still pretty good), but they’re simply not an option because we’re anchored to this house.
Lolis
@Reality Check:
You are a dumbass.
Reality Check
Gee, looks like I touched a nerve with the Warmists. It really is like arguing with a fundie Christian that no, the Bible is not, in fact, really the word of God, and no, the rapture ISN’T coming. Same exact reactions.
GVG
Florida’s population trends had begun leveling & going down a bit before the bust and even before the last insane bubble period. We had been increasing for so long that most people were incapable of noticing it wasn’t happening anymore and it wasn’t just polititans nor builders. Our tax structure was also set up for the decades of growth and was running into problems over and over. See the pols had discovered people didn’t like taxes and they got fewer complaints if they taxed newcomers who didn’t yet have much say. Also oldtimers voted better and resented the newcomers that made their roads crowded etc. So we had a ton of impact fees and the property tax could only go up 3% a year which meant the longer you were in your home the better a deal you had compared to new buyers since value always (until the bust) went up more than 3%. This was acurately predicted as a future problem oh…maybe 20 years ago. The demographics and rival sunny destinations etc made that pretty definate. Naturally they didn’t fix it before it caused a problem.
On top of that the 2002-2006 ish period had some really stupid bubble building. Grandiose ideas of building complete towns bigger than the towns already there recreating Ocala’s villages in several places. The urban south Miami etc had a luxury home condo bubble. The really weird thing is it was obvious there just weren’t that many more people around to buy these things yet there were multiple grand speculators doing it. I understand commercial real estate also did the overbuilding though I don’t know as much about it. all I can say is that there were a lot of 1/2 filled strip malls but they were still building brand new ones…I can understand regular builders who got stuck with a few unsold but these “projects were building hundreds of places in each development at a time even while the local occupancy rate was not good and getting worse.
There was such a proposed development of thousands of acres on the edge of my town in the most scenic tree covered area….residents and the county commission nixed it to my relief because there just weren’t that many people moving to the area and we could have gotten stuck with a 1/4 built huge empty development eyesore for decades.
Florida’s history is pretty much all land speculation fools so we’ll survive this crash too.
hhex65
@Reality Check: the sad thing about huffing glue is that when the high wears off it is followed by a long period of depression, self loathing and guilt.
trollhattan
@hhex65:
[Realtycheque to self: “Order more glue!”]
piratedan
@JCT: well if you need a guide to some of the “nicer” areas of town, just drop me a line here or at my blog. There are some nifty neighborhoods that have some unexpected boundaries and some sections of town that have unexpected aesthetics.
Paul in KY
@Corner Stone: Laundry. Back when I was a callow teenager, I let my mother do my laundry, rather than me screwing it up.
Origuy
@Reality Check: That link you posted a while back? The one that had “uk” in it? How many times did the word “Britain” appear in it? New England isn’t “Britain”! The British Isles don’t get a lot of snow to begin with and the weather outside your mom’s basement isn’t the world’s climate.
John Weiss
@Corner Stone: I’d rather live under a bridge than live in North Dakota.
S. cerevisiae
Our resident troll is probably just pissed off because this has proven that those pesky climate scientists were right all along.
John Weiss
@Reality Check: Sure. You’ve been taken in by the misnomer “global warming”. The world’s heating up, for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be warmer where you are! Generally what will/is happenin(g) is that the weather will become both more violent and more extreme. Sorry to tell you Big Al and the overwhelming majority of atmospheric scientists are right and you’re not.
4jkb4ia
Thanks, John. I didn’t really think you would let me get away with having David Freese’s initials in my handle, possibly permanently.
4jkb4ia
And insane optimism is prompting me to think, “Maybe, John Cole forgave you”. Which is worth dancing in the street. But I have to run because it’s going to be Shabbos in 3.5 hours.
@JPL:
Holland Cotter did not get a Pulitzer for nothing. What was that I said about having to run?
OzoneR
@Reality Check:
Global Warming causes sudden and strange twists in the weather.
You want to explain why New York had, a near record high on Columbus Day and it’s now snowing.
OzoneR
@Reality Check:
yeah, right next to the torture devices used by Christians on Muslims.
idiot.
OzoneR
@Reality Check:
The fact that you can’t see that this is proof of a radically changing climate really makes me wonder about humanity.
Rafer Janders
@OzoneR:
That has been odd. I’ve moved from shorts, t-shirts and sandals to sweater, warm coat, gloves and wool hat in the space of two weeks. It’s a pretty sudden damn temperature shift.
JGabriel
Reality Check:
I don’t know about “Warmists”, but here’s physicist Richard Muller, a former denialist and skeptic, who recently performed a study to disprove global warming — funded in part by the Koch Brothers — but came to the opposite conclusion:
Cheers, Reality Check.
.
jon
@PurpleGirl: I was being very facetious when I mentioned gold. I do know from AM radio that now is a great time to buy gold and the price is projected to go up and up forever until Pat Boone is revealed to be the Messiah. Or maybe it was some other guy. But thanks for pointing out that gold could go down in value.
jon
@JCT: Look at the Miles and West University neighborhoods. Or buy a lot in Armory Park or Barrio Anita and custom build something you actually want. I like the funky small homes, but not enough to move out of my neighborhood.
I can’t say what it is you don’t like or where it is you’re coming from, but if you’re in the Foothills market for price you can find great quality and charm in the Sam Hughes area as well as some other neighborhoods. Find a different realtor if you must, as it sounds like your old one was just going for the biggest percentage rather than the right fit for you.