But it's not a "formula for disaster" ... and it won't happen much to 'hapless' people (though I'm sure the NY Times will find said hapless people and put them on the front page and shake their heads and wag their fingers, and Doug will tut-tut along with them). And in the mean time, the overall growth of home ownership is, yes, I do believe, a good thing. But it will also have some downside: it will contribute to the gutting of the cities, it will eat up open land and turn it into sprawl, it will make highway congestion worse.
What's the alternative? In Doug's world, you put blame on people who want to buy their way out of their sh*thole apartment (hey, everyone should do what he did: get a nice rent-controlled place on the Upper West Side!) and their a*swipe slumlord, plus some on the greedy-bastard bankers and call all of them "mad" ...
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Loki knows I didn't mean to inadvertently breathe new life into the mighty housing financing debates of '05.
But your post inspires a question...
Is the choice for millions really only between - as you seem to have presented it here - life in lousy apartments (I'm visualing rats and roaches conspiring in dark corners) or sprawl-tastic, gridlock inducing houses in developments named things like 'Raven's Beak'?
What's preventing people from moving into the older burbs or the cities?
And now for the obligatory re-phrase for clarity: owning a house is cool; got no argument with that. But what's pushing Americans further and further away from population centers to find their dream houses (a move that ironically results in the creation of new clusters of pop. density and yet more flight)?
.d.
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