Now the shoe is on the other foot: how the housing crash looks, in South Florida, by gimleteye

Muted. Muted in the press. Muted on the street. The Conference Board's guage of consumer confidence has fallen to 95, whatever that means.

We've become so used to indicators of economic health that really don't mean much to ordinary people, that no one really wants to think--or to write--three essential questions: if the housing crash is, like Robert Shiller says, "like an accident in slow motion", how far are we from the accident being over?

Who is at fault? And how do we make sure that whoever was at fault, allowing the building boom and housing bubble to tranform Miami-Dade County into a deficit-ridden mess of infrastructure needs totalling billions, is never allowed close to County Hall?

In an interview with Marketwatch, Shiller declined to take up the interviewer's question about the recession. I've been saying for months, that Florida is in a recession now based on a frozen real estate market and that we are heading into the worst real estate crash in nearly 100 years, since binder boys stood on the street corners in downtown Miami and traded property titles like tulip bulbs in Holland in the 17th century.

That's a lot further back than most writers on the economy are willing to go who are, nonetheless, summoning demons of the Savings and Loan debacle (which also had a Miami flavor to it). No, what we have going on here is unprecedented in scale. It's not just Florida housing markets, or housing markets in California or elsewhere that are frozen. The US dollar is plummeting and investors who had been buying US assets on the cheap are starting to wonder about the basketcase the United States is turning into.

The local view of that basketcase was on full display in Miami, in 2005, when the lobbying crowd representing land speculators and production home builders were on the warpath with a powerpoint presentation showing the incessant growth of population necessitated opening more space for development, more zoning for houses, for malls, for office parks in suburbia. The civic side scarcely got a word in edge-wise: either in public forums or in the mainstream press.

Every homebuilder in Miami-Dade County was itching for more, more, more even as the smart money was leaving the table.

Today the Wall Street Journal reports, "Some vendors of religious supplies say St. Joseph statues are flying off the shelves as an increasing number of skeptics and non-Catholics look for some saintly intervention to help them sell their houses." Where is the powerpoint presentation on THAT?

Shiller says that market has worsened in the past month. The biggest drop since 1991, the last housing cycle bottom. "It looks like the market is getting worse and worse." And among economic experts, Shiller is not alone.

I wonder what local banks are in trouble, in addition to shareholders and executives of Ocean Bank--one of the prime local instigators of "growth at any cost".

Although the New York Times reports that the high end of the real estate market, houses in excess of $1 million, is holding up well in comparison to lower cost homes, the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index shows Miami takes the prize, for highest relative values in the nation.

According to Dow Jones Newwires, the Standard & Poor's S&P/Case-Shiller home price index shows why "the fall in home prices is showing no real signs of a slowdown or turnaround."

We're waiting for the Miami Dade County Commission to reject the four applications to move the Urban Development Boundary. With the worst housing market in a century, don't you wonder what your county commissioners will do?

"So far we've held up, but it's a little precarious. At this point things do seem to be worsening," Shiller tells Marketwatch on the national economy.

I think it is time for the day of reckoning with the growth machine in Florida. We watched how it chewed up the public interest in quality of life, on its meteoric rise gobbling up wetlands faster than espresso at noon on Calle Ocho.

The growth machine laughed at the arguments of civic activists and environmentalists and neighborhood people. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

But has the other foot forgotten entirely, what it is good for?