The mainstream media is filled with reports of troubled home real estate markets.
Real estate professionals are dancing fast as they can..
Here is the Miami Herald reporting today, “The market is rolling back to a normal period.” That’s according to one spokesperson.
Isn’t ‘Rolling back’ kind of like a ‘surge’?
Report after report claim that the real estate market has “bottomed out”.
Tell "the market has bottomed out” to someone who has been holding back on lowering the sales price of their home or condo for months and can’t wait any longer, or, to someone who has to swallow a big loss soon on a condo unit that is nearing completion, or, a production home builder biting his nails wondering why low Federal Reserve interest rates haven’t stimulated enough demand to make a dent in his inventory, or, to the investment bank or pension fund holding hundreds of millions in the multi-trillion dollar market for collateral mortgage obligations—weapons of financial mass destruction that are locked and loaded.
The Miami Herald article ends with a quote from another real estate analyst in Miami: “Instead of the bubble bursting, it ended up being a soft landing,” he said. “We’re going through the soft landing now.”
OK. We get the point: what is happening to real estate isn’t a multiple choice question-- past, or, present.
Now the reason we bring this up, isn’t simply because we like pointing out how the mainstream media is ignoring the manifold signs of instability in the US economy.
What we would like to point out is that elected officials in the city of Miami and the county have spent nearly a dozen years bending over backwards to accommodate the growth lobby for construction and development, now tanking, while the quality of life for the rest of us has been on a steady decline.
During this time, land speculators, condo developers and condo flippers, and big production home builders have had the run of city and county hall.
Regulations have been “streamlined” or eliminated altogether, while the backlog of infrastructure costs we will have to pay, has skyrocketed.
It would be helpful if the mainstream media began to reflect these painful realities because stories that read like press statements from the real estate industry are just making people angry.
We are waiting for the Miami Herald editorial page to weigh in, where responsibility lies.
A good place for the editorial board to start would be on the necessity of reforming county government, starting with an endorsement of the executive mayor referendum scheduled 24 days from now.
2 comments:
Building Bust is Responsibility of the City of Miami & Miami-Dade County
Yes, the real-estate market has gotten a lot softer in recent months. This will have a major effect on all of our businesses, property values and quality of life for quite sometime. You may have your choice in blaming the U.S. economy, higher property taxes, skyrocketing insurance premiums, too many luxury condos and homes being built while enough workforce and affordable housing are available. You may wish to blame the developers for displacing some folks from their neighborhoods and building way too much. You may even wish to blame the media for fanning the flames of our present crisis. But I think we all know who is really at fault for our real-estate dilemma.
We can thank our Miami and Miami-Dade County administrators, and elected officials that are supposed to be the stewards of our communities and protectors of its citizens. Our city and County governments are totally to blame for allowing tens of thousands of new luxury condo units and homes to be built. It is estimated that it will take five to ten years for most of them to be absorbed in this real-estate market.
A car dealer would not stock thousands of extra cars for his lot. Publics would not stock thousands of extra turkeys for Thanksgiving. AMC Cineplex would not screen the same film in all of its theaters at the same time. Home Depot would not stock thousands of extra gasoline generators before and especially after hurricane season. American Airlines would not schedule thousands of flights to the same destination. But the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County allow developers with the help of their lobbyists to build more, higher, bigger, expensive buildings.
They willingly and seemingly obediently acquiesce to up-zoning, variances and special permits more times than not. They accommodate the developers as often as they can. They treat developers’ attorneys and lobbyists more like consultants and pals then adversaries. They have little regard for the neighborhoods’ quality of life, limitations of potable water, increased traffic, increased flooding, increased sewage, reduction of green space, not enough schools, not enough firemen or police, removal of trees and not enough street or even adequate enough new building parking.
Our city and county Commissioners and Mayor do not seem to have the long term best interest for our community. We must hire better qualified, more professional and more responsible stewards of our future. We must place a moratorium on all building until some of the thousands of units in inventory are absorbed by the marketplace, we must stop permitting variances, special permits and up-zoning. We must tell the developers and their lobbyists that developers may only build what their property is zoned for. We must make the zoning fit the neighborhood and not the other way around. We must make sure that the so called “Miami 21” is of benefit to our neighborhoods, citizens, quality of life and to our community’s future.
Harry Emilio Gottlieb
Coconut Grove
really good points.
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