Salon 1

There is a lot of talk in the media these days about the housing crisis – regarding the fact that there have been a lot of foreclosures recently.  All of the explanations I have heard from so-called experts claim that the source of all of this is due to banks giving risky loans to people with bad credit.  I think this is indicative of a general trend in this country to always assume that if someone is having money problems, it is because they are irresponsible.  This explanation is an opion based on a simplistic analysis.  I have no doubt there are these cases, but it cannot account for all cases.  In fact, a more obvious explanation is the incredible rising housing costs over the past few years, fueled by greed and this concept of “flipping houses”.  I moved to VA from OH in 2006 at the height of a house flipping frenzy.  Greed had sky rocketed the price of houses over the last 4 years at an exponential rate.  Although the term house-flipping originally meant buing houses in pooor condition, fixing them up, and reselling them at a higher price;  in VA, people got the idea that they could just buy a brand new house and turn right around and sell it for a higher price.  This continued for several years until people moving to the area with upper-middle-class salaries (like me) could no longer afford to buy a house, and there coincidentally also became a surplus of housing as developers tried to catch up to the rapid expansion of the greater Washington, DC area.  People, and not just realtors, began buying houses as investment properties.  Now, the peak has been reached and is now falling, and many speculators were left to rent their houses in hope of waiting it out.  Now they are left to foreclose.  Why is no one talking about this?