Housing Bubble 2.0 - (Part 2) - Voila, an American Dream


Posted On: Saturday - July 8th 2017 8:04PM MST
In Topics: 
  Immigration Stupidity  Music  University  China  Economics

In yesterday's post on Housing Bubble 2.0, graphs of median prices for cities in 5 regions of the country were presented. The conclusion was that the US West Coast is experiencing this much more than elsewhere due to the influx of foreign money, from China in particular.

Other evidence for this is the University towns/cities. This writer has been traveling quite a bit recently, and it is quite noticeable now how many Chinese travelers there are, on the airlines. When you notice where they are going to or coming from, it is almost always some city or town with a big university. They are everywhere education is, mostly in graduate schools (engineering/computers/stats are majority Chinese ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY.), but also many at the undergraduate level. What this has to do with housing is coming in a bit.

This is the time to mention the city of Boston though, alluded to as a special case in Part 1. Most big cities are bound to have a number of colleges of some sort, but they are not usually a big part of the economy. Boston is a big exception. Besides the goodly number of famous ones, MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Cambridge, and Northeastern, there are hundreds of colleges there. There are in the neighborhood of 150,000 college students just at the big name schools. The college scene, cntrl-left and wacky as it may be these days, is still a great counterbalance to the rest of the population of that city, known as the Massholes, and that appellation was not lightly earned by the residents of that city. How they could be descendants of the early founders of our country is a mystery to the Peak Stupidity staff.

Anyway, the point of this post in relation to housing is that many of these Chinese people with their hard-earned, or (usually) hard-extorted, US dollars want to stay in the country. Even if they don't want to stay, there are many Chinese young people who are sent here for college based on the reputation of US Universities as being the best institutions of learning - this is the subject of a post coming Monday (we don't agree with this.) Others are sent by their rich corrupt gov't-official parents as a foothold to get their money out of China and at the same time to buy citizenship or gain it via their kid (usually just one.) It is not just the big West Coast cities seeing this foreign influence on the housing market. The Case/Shiller data shown in Part 1 was only computed for those 20 big cities. I have only anecdotes, but am sure that smaller University towns are experiencing some bidding-up of housing prices - maybe only in certain neighborhoods - due to the influence of Chinese money.

Hey, I get along pretty well with Chinese people, but people should just realize that this effect is far and wide. It may not be too long before things are changed as to be unrecognizable as traditional America for someone raised in the 1980's even. Many formerly middle-class people may be priced out of anywhere nice in the cities. Americans do like living out in the country, so there is that, in BIG CONTRAST to the Chinese who reckon that anyone not living in the big city is an illiterate piece of trash (which is their definition back home, in the Old Middle Country). Are we going to be all out in the hinterlands, as our foreign Overlords run the show? Living among your own people in your own place is an integral part of the "American Dream"*, but that may not be possible after a while of this.

Is it still America in Augusta, Georgia, at least? "Voila, An American Dream ...



... where we can travel, girl, without any means"

That's the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and it's Linda Rondstadt singing harmony there! It was written by Rodney Crowell and released in 1979.

* What will that even mean anymore?

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