Housing market's gonna crash

There's also been massive shifts in population. Florida, Texas, Arizona and Idaho top the lists for population expansion. They're all in the single digits for growth, though as there's a number of states that had growth as people migrated. Then again, some states with large cities had people just moving out of the city but staying in the state.

But there's been precipitous drops in population in California, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts. New Jersey has lost 10% of it's pre-COVID population in the last two years. Pre-Murphy population was almost 12 million people. Murphy's first term saw almost 2 million leave after we went from about 8.7 million people in 2010 to the 11.7 million in like 2014 or whenever it was. In 2020, NJ's population was about 9.2 million people. Right now, NJ's population is about 8.5 million. To lose 3.2 million people in 6-7 years is insane. That's 27% of the population that left. Most of them went to Florida or the Carolinas.

But those population shifts from major economic centers of the country (CA, NJ, NY) to other states with less economic might is catastrophic on both ends. Florida is already struggling with the influx of residents. Texas and Arizona can't build houses fast enough and Idaho...yeah, not so quiet there anymore. Meanwhile the morons in Trenton can't figure out why the tax base is eroding. Maybe because they are hostile to everyone and everything that isn't a trendy cause to support and people are just done with it. New York is in the same way and run by an equally clueless pack of chuckleheads.

But yeah, the point is that these population shifts drive stuff like property values up in the places they are moving too and they kill values in the places they are leaving. The value loss makes the inflation pinch hurt more and the value increase in the other places hurts the folks already there because it means people are going there and leaning on resources more. So demand goes up which drives up prices which increases the cost of living across the board.

This is how things normally happen and you get ebbs and flows as certain areas get more popular because of whatever reason from favorable weather to favorable tax situations to a boom in some business market needing help and supplying tons of jobs. It usually takes 5-10 years, though. For it to happen in less than 2 is shocking to the whole system.

It just feels like a perfect storm of failure and the more you look in to it the more you see how it's all interconnected and then the weak links start to get scarily obvious because you can see them well on their way to failing. If enough of those weak links fail, the whole thing's gonna come crashing down.

Sooo...interesting news today.

Heard from my local town council, well one of the members, that a real estate development group that owns a significant amount of property in town that is either undeveloped or dilapidated has been dragging their feet for at least 3 years now. They have been squabbling with the town over middling details and at this point, I'm positive that they are doing it purposefully because of market projections in 2020 and values going sky high. They were waiting for costs to drop.

But now that they are dropping, they are citing a severe market slow down as a reason not to continue building the housing they were on the hook for via adjudicated agreement with the town. The town had dumped millions into the projects since about 2017 and so far, the only things done have been the construction of low-income housing to meet the federal guidelines implemented and walkway improvement throughout the town which was one of the things the development company said was necessary to make it "walkable" and thereby enticing to new residents in the proposed rental unit blocks. That low-income housing is only 1/5th of what was agreed on.

Well, found out today that the development company, citing rapidly changing housing markets across the country, applied for an indefinite extension to table the plans until a time when the projects make more financial sense (i.e.: profitable).

The town is rightfully ticked off at this because we've had this eyesore of a dilapidated former manufacturing facility in the center of the town that is the subject of a Superfund project and now, because of the developing housing market, the development company is reneging on the deal and trying to back out.

So the town applied for a temporary injunction against the development company so they can file the court case to compel them to finish the project in a timely fashion.

Additionally, we saw, on the way back home last night, that there was a new development sign staked out in a wooded location across the street from a golf course not too far away from us. So I went online a few minutes ago after hearing my town's news to see what the status was there. The builder's site makes no mention of the buying resources but the "news" section says that they scored an agreement and permit to build 100 new high end homes in that location staring at $550K back in January and gave a link for the buying resources which now just goes back to the developer's home page.

Things are afoot.

You're getting off topic, folks.

I'm tellin' ya, we're heading off a cliff

https://www.attomdata.com/news/market-trends/attom-q1-2022-housing-risk-report/