What the Future Holds

Provided the newly-rechristened First Horseman 0f the Apocalypse Flu doesn't wipe us out, what can we look forward to in the economy. In particular, what does the housing market portend?

I'm no economist, though I play one on tv, nor am I a real estate agent. But these numbers from Phoenix paint a bleak picture.

About a year ago, we had a real estate agent in our house who drew a chart for us projecting the future of the housing market. She drew an upside-down bell curve. She showed us near the top of the downward trend, and she said, your house won't be worth what it is today for another five years.

Which means we still have four years to go. But what does that mean?

Well, it means that even if the economic stimulus has an effect on the economy, it's ability to produce a significant positive shift is limited by consumers' ability to buy a new house. Certainly with 51% drops in housing prices, there are many bargains out there, but people who currently own a house won't be able to take advantage of them for several years, not until their own home value recovers its losses, plus the costs of selling, plus the downpayment on the new house. Because of necessary changes in bank lending practices, people who lost their homes to foreclosure won't be able to buy those cheap houses, either. Which means the glut of cheap houses will last a long time, further depressing house prices, and extending the time before current owners can afford to move.

Not four years down the road before a real recovery can begin. More like six years, and that's barring any slips. There are bound to be slips. The next recession cycle could hit before we have recovered from this one.

The fundamentals of our economy are not at all sound. I think the very idea of growth is going to have to be reconsidered. Sustainability should be our new goal, but for that to happen, there will have to be a universal reset of debt. Not a zeroing out, but at the very least a reappraisal to determine actual value. We need a societal stress test - and an honest one, not a rigged one like the banks received.

We can't achieve sustainability as long as we have to service massive debt. Debt is not sustainable. It always increases, always demands more.

Here We Go Again

In Perils of House Hunting, I told you about my experiences with the paranormal while shopping for a new house.

Having lived in haunted houses before, finding an unhaunted house was high on my list of priorities when looking for a new place to live. When we found our new house, one of the reasons I liked it so much was because it seemed to be something of a clean slate. The house is only 13 years old (which is no guarantee) but I couldn't sense anything negative or positive about it, and my youngest son never expressed any uneasy feelings, either. It seemed to be the perfect place.

Not long after moving in, my wife told me she had been seeing movement out of the corner of her eye quite a bit, but I still hadn't experienced anything unusual until the other day when I saw a chihuahua walking toward me from the dining room. We don't have a chihuahua, but the previous owners had five or six.

If the ghost of a chihuahua is the worst I have to deal with, I can live with that. But this past Saturday morning, something even more strange happened. My work ID disappeared right out of my hand. Seriously. I was holding it one minute, and the next minute I wasn't. I couldn't remember where I had set it down. I searched the house top to bottom. I looked everywhere I had been since I picked it up. It was gone.

Sunday night I found it at the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer. I don't remember putting it there. I'm pretty sure I didn't put it there. So, apparently my prankster spirit has finally tracked me down. This is how it began last time - when my car keys disappeared for a day.

Alas.

The Unexpected Perils of House Hunting

Lately, I've been researching paranormal investigation methods as part of the rewrite for my new novel. In so doing, I am reminded of something that happened to me summer of '07 while shopping for houses.

I met my real estate agent, Angela (not her real name) at a foreclosure house in Olive Branch. As we approached the door, Angela told me that she had stopped by the house the day before to check it out, because it was such a good house in a good location and she hadn't known that it was for sale until I mentioned it to her. So while she's trying to unlock the door, she tells me that the day before she was having a hard time getting the door open and had the distinct impression that somebody was on the other side of the door trying to keep her out. As she's saying this, she can't get the door unlocked, so I step up to help and I can't get it unlocked. Finally, the key works for her and the door unlocks.

We enter the house and it's in a state. Not the worst I'd ever seen (that came a couple of weeks later, in the house with no cabinet doors and a pile of shit on the stairs), but still pretty bad. So Angela tells me that she didn't even look at the upstairs because once she got in the house, she could have sworn somebody was upstairs, so she left after a quick walk through.

Now she heads for the kitchen, while I take a turn through the dining room. Just as I walk around the corner, a toilet upstairs flushes. I get into the kitchen and say, is that a toilet? She says, I think so, and then we both hear somebody walking around upstairs.

Discretion being the better part of valor, we decide this house won't work for me and hightail it. But on the way out the door, I glance into the downstairs half bath and it looks like something out of Amityville - wallpaper peeling in strips down the walls.

We get outside and I photograph all the upstairs windows, hoping to get a glimpse of the intruder peering out, but nothing shows up in my pictures. We move on and I see about a billion other houses ove the following year until finally, in August '08, we pick out the house we will eventually buy. I turn around and there, kittycorner across the street from our new house, is that haunted foreclosure from last summer.

All I can say is, I am damn glad I didn't move there. But I wonder if I should tell the current owners. I figure sooner or later we'll see them leave in the middle of the night.

Another house hunting ghost story:

Last spring, a fine old house came up for sale in old town Olive Branch, on Pigeon Roost Road three doors down from the elementary school. It was an interesting old place, sitting on an acre and a half of land right there in the middle of the city, and the price was within reason, provided it didn't need too much immediate work. After looking it over and talking it over with my father, we were almost on the point of buying it. We thought we could move in and do a little bit at a time and end up with a real showpiece.

With a house that old, though, you have to expect there will be some residue. There's going to be a ghost, or repeating phantasms, or something. I was very conscious of this every time I looked at the place. I tried to feel for it, because I can usually tell a haunted house just by looking at it. But my impressions about this place were ambiguous at best. I thought the house could work for us.

So I was over there one afternoon with my youngest - the ghost attractor. Remember him?

We're looking around, checking out the barn and stuff. We're there about twenty minutes when all of a sudden, with no obvious outside stimulus, he says, Daddy I want to go home now. I don't like this house. It's scary. And he heads for the car. I open the door and he climbs inside by himself, which he almost never does, and asks me to shut the door and can we please go NOW!

So over the next few days, I drive by the house a few times with him in the car, just to see if his opinion will change. Every time he sees it, he says, that's a scary house. I ask, do you want to stop and look at it and he says, in no uncertain terms, no he doesn't want to stop, he doesn't want to live there.

I've read The Shining. We didn't buy the house.

Economics Lesson #4295: I Can Has Brains?

Q: Citigroup holds my current mortgage. If they go bankrupt, does that mean I won't have to pay my mortgage?

A: Of course not. Credit can be wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, but debt is a zombie that cannot be killed.

Holy Koresh!

We're now Olive Branch Davidians.

Serenity NOW!

You would think, with the mortgage loan crisis and people going bankrupt left and right and defaulting on their mortgages, that the mortgage companies would be bending over backwards to retain and please their good customers, the ones who, rather than mail them the keys, agree to eat the 10% loss of value on their home when trying to sell it.

BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!


The government will bail them out, what do they care?

If this falls though, it's Jingle Mail time. Buy a new house, then mail in the keys to the old one. I could've done that three months ago, but I tried to do the right thing. In return, I get people who can't be bothered to return my phone calls, and when I finally do catch them answering their phones, they lie. It's like a bad marriage.

Modern Ship Building

"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern ship building has gone beyond that." - Captain Smith, Commander of the Titanic

Bad housing/economic news here, here and here.

Our house is currently on the market. If you can call it a market. More like a garage sale. We couldn't have picked a worse time since before we were in high school to try to move. Funny little world, innit?

So earlier this week, our realtor sent me the latest data on comparable home sales in our neighborhood.

Since July, there have been twelve houses sold. Of the those, nine were foreclosures and one was a foreclosure house flip that sold for $20K under market value.

I have nothing more to say about this, except that it blows donkey.

on second thought

I do have something more to say. The reason we want to move is so we can get our kids into a good school district.

Which begs the question, why does where you live determine whether or not you get to go to a good school? The accident of a child's birth should not, in any kind of just world, condemn that child to ignorance and poverty.

What kind of fucked up world do we live in where if you live on this street, you can attend a decent school, but if you live one street over, that's just too bad, so sad, cry me a river. Tell your parents to get off their asses and get a real job and maybe they can afford to move to a better neighborhood.

We happen to be able to afford to move to a better neighborhood. Because of the shitty housing market, we're stuck here, which means our kids are stuck going to subpar schools. And these schools aren't even that bad - we just want better for our kids. If we lived a few miles to the northwest, they'd be stuck in elementary prison.

America is the wealthiest nation in the world. So why don't all American kids have good schools to go to? Why, in God's holy name, does their ZIP Code or for that matter which side of the street they live on determine the quality of their school?

Life isn't fair. I'm a realist. And I know this complaint isn't new or even particularly original. But Good God, people, this is as fundamental as it gets. If we lived in a world in which the government went out and speared to death all the children in a particular ZIP Code, we'd never ever let that action stand. So why is it ok to allow these kids to die slowly over the course of fifty or sixty years of poverty and ignorance brought about by the accident of where they were born? Wouldn't it just be simpler, and less expensive, to kill all the first born of the poor? We would achieve the same results. What matter the day they enter the grave, they're doomed the day they're born.

Good schools for every child is not a fundamental right, but it should be. It has to be, if this country is to survive. How much longer can we last as a nation if only a small percentage of our population is able to get a decent education? We seem to be blind to the icebergs in our path. We think we're too strong a nation to founder, but we're foundering now.

And when we do go down, rest assured, the people who brought us here will be the first off the boat.

"What do you think I am? Do you believe that I'm the sort that would have left that ship as long as there were any women and children on board? That's the thing that hurts, and it hurts all the more because it is so false and baseless. I have searched my mind with deepest care, I have thought long over each single incident that I could recall of that wreck. I'm sure that nothing wrong was done; that I did nothing that I should not have done. My conscience is clear and I have not been a lenient judge of my own acts." -J. Bruce Ismay, Director of the White Star Line, and survivor of the Titanic

In the New Year

Last week, in the last hours of the late lamented 37¢ stamp, I sent out a flurry of stories that I hope will develop into a perfect storm of publications.

And, as you can see, I've been practicing asinine metaphors. And studying my Agrippa.

In all, I sent out eight stories last week, including two brand new stories. Added to the two stories I sent out before Christmas, that makes ten (but check my arithetic, I could be wrong). And I just sent out an eleventh story to a magazine whose reading period opened up in January.

I wrote some of these stories two or three years ago and have been steadily sending them out and getting rejections and revising them when editors were kind enough to offer critiques. And like I said, two of them are brand new.

I started one story, called Booker, while I was reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, as mentioned below. I outlined Booker about two years ago, then I wrote the first thousand words in March of 2004. While reading Midnight, I got all inspired and stuff and started writing and two days later there was this finished 14,000 word story sitting in front of me.

The other new story, called The Prettiest Woman in the Room, happened quite beyond my control while I was eating lunch at Taco Smell. I was sitting there reading a collection of Carson McCullers' short stories and giving up on a second bean burrito when this story jumped up and bit me on the buttocks. By four o'clock, the short 1200 word story was finished. Funny when that happens, you know.

So now, I'm writing another long story. I meant to get back to my screenplays and revising a novel, but these shorter things just keeping jumping up and won't be ignored.

I've also been shopping for a new house and learning some important life lessons. One important home-buying lesson is that there are predatory real estate agents out there who buy up foreclosed homes for a third to a half market value, slap some new paint on them and maybe some new carpets and a new fridge and then turn around and try to sell them to you at market price (and once you move in, you still have a ton of shit to fix that couldn't be fixed with that quarter-inch of new paint they put on everything to hide the stains and the mold). Good work if you can get it because the only work involved is having access to those foreclosed home listings and having the money in hand to buy them and a gang of undocumented workers to slop a little paint around for you. But for those of us actually looking for a house to buy and live in and raise a family it makes it difficult to get a good deal on a home.

And getting a good deal is important, because the price of houses (and everything else) keeps going up, but not our salaries, so we have to make do on less and less. When buying a new house, I'm looking for a lower payment than what I am paying now because I know it could be two or three years before I get another raise and by that time the cost of groceries will have gone up another 50% and the cost of gas will have doubled again and I won't even be able to maintain. So I have to find a house at below market because the housing market is ridiculously overinflated. Housing in some areas where I am looking has gone up 30%-40% in just the last four years. My health insurance costs have tripled in the same amount of time. And I have added two children to the payroll. Then you have to make sure you're in a good school district or else send the kids to private school and now you're back in the hole again even if you got a good deal on the house.

So, in other words, Happy New Year suckers.