[yonran]

The tragedy is even sadder when you find out that the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession were self-inflicted by the Federal Reserve and CFPB after 2007, not the inevitable result of reckless borrowers. Kevin Erdmann has been studying this for about a decade and gives examples of cities such as Atlanta that had no housing boom at all but were forced into foreclosure crisis. Here is his most recent op-ed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/05/housing-c...

[jalapenos]

Actually they were inflicted by the Fed dropping rates to zero following the tech bubble bursting (2000), blowing up a real estate bubble.

You'd think the USSR would've been enough to stop people believing in central planning. But this is unlikely, since the desire for central planning is actually an innate instinct - a child wanting parents to handle everything for them.

[yonran]

There wasn’t much of a bubble. The price bubble that people cited is mostly explained by exclusionary zoning driving up rents in Closed Access cities (e.g. New York, San Francisco, Boston) and migration from those cities to Contagion cities (e.g. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Seattle). There was no reason for the government to destroy home values nationwide in cities that had no boom at all (e.g. Atlanta). And given that since the Great Recession, rents and prices have risen even higher than the peak of the “bubble” in Closed Access cities, we now can see that the entire Recession was pointless since the Fed killed the homebuilding industry in Contagion cities but didn’t address the root of the problem in Closed Access cities.