From the Courier Post Online:
If you think South Jersey residents are hostile to increased development, you haven’t heard the roar from towns north of Trenton.
“Resistance to development is in its infancy in South Jersey,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
“North Jersey folks have been fighting it longer. They’ve been seriously banking open space and farmland preservation since 1985. Therefore, at least in the short term, it’s a lot easier to develop in the south,” he said.
Hughes’ message was not wasted on a receptive audience of 300 bankers, builders, lawyers, developers, investors, Realtors and others likely to be scouting potentially developable land in New Jersey.
Hughes joined a panel of speakers Thursday at the Mansion on Main Street to discuss market forces that are driving South Jersey’s economy in the forum sponsored by the law firm Ballard Spahr.
“South Jersey has been fully responsible for keeping the state’s growth ledgers positive,” Hughes said.
Between December 2000 and November 2006 — a period of recession and recovery — South Jersey added 56,000, or 93 percent of the state’s total job growth.
The generic reasons for the growth, according to Hughes, are:
affordable housing
lower business expenses, due to cheaper land and less union activity
improved mass transit
a business climate that is perceived to be friendlier than North Jersey.
http://housingpanic.blogspot.com/
FLASH: Cash-back mortgage fraud scam sweeping Arizona (and the US): “could erode confidence and values in Arizona’s real estate market”
Sunday, January 21, 2007
ARIZONA HOUSING IMPLOSION CODE RED!!!!
Nice again to see the MSM (and the lazy Catherine Reagor!) FINALLY reporting on the meat of the housing bubble ponzi scheme, although the cat is way out of the bag now.
Greg Swann’s Phoenix Arizona may in the end be the epicenter of not just the housing bubble, but also mortgage fraud. Why? Because there are no real jobs in Phoenix. Just a bunch of high school GED’s gaming the system with mortgage fraud, fake appraisals, and the REIC spinning out of control.
Oh, man, this is going to end so ugly. Someone get the paddywagon, we got a bunch of ’em to put in jail when this is over. And billions, if not trillions, in fraudulent loans. Fannie, Freddie, hedge funds, Countrywide shareholders and China should be a bit nervous right about now.
Valley fighting mortgage fraud wave
A wave of mortgage fraud is rippling through pockets of the Valley, inflating home values through scams called cash-back deals.
Left unchecked, cash-back deals cost homeowners and lenders millions of dollars and could erode confidence and values in Arizona’s real estate market.
The fraud involves obtaining a mortgage for more than a home is worth and pocketing the extra money in cash. Neighbors may then discover home values in the area are exaggerated.
Homeowners stuck with overpriced mortgages may never recover the difference. And lenders end up with bad loans that, in the long run, could hurt the Arizona real estate market, the largest segment of the state economy.
“Arizona was like a housing gold rush for speculators from California, Florida and Texas a few years ago,” said Detroit real estate agent and fraud activist Ralph Roberts, author of the book Flipping Houses for Dummies. “But home prices stopped climbing, and speculators got greedy. Now the cash-back scam is going to make the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s look like a soft landing”
There is certainly more room for growth in the southern part of the state, but that growth is going to have to overcome an intense headwind in the form of terrible economic conditions.
As the overall economy deteriorates, the “growth” areas are going to see their “development” stall.
By most accounts residential RE is already overbuilt in much of the southern part of the state, and the proliferation of subprime loans are going to push foreclosures in much of South Jersey through the roof in the next few years.